Most people don't think too deeply, and nowhere is that more evident than a.m. radio. No, Rush Limbaugh is not the king of shallow. He's talking politics after all, and that's a rather abstract topic -- Rush is almost deep compared to Dr. Laura Schlesinger, the snotty woman takes calls from around the country trying to help people with "moral issues." Now, she doesn't have a degree in ethics (she's a licensed family counselor) and her knowledge of philosophy and literature is quite limited (she seems to have started and stopped reading with the Bible), but she's got a large audience for her radio show and books.

Dr. Laura is judgmental and narrow-minded. She doesn't believe that young people should have too much freedom. She calls things like 13-year-olds exchanging hugs "inappropriate behavior" whether it's consensual or not, and she berates people for having (gasp!) extra-marital sex. She's one of those neo-Victorian thinkers who uses the word "permissiveness" as a curse.

On one hand, she accepts the notion that homosexuals should have the same rights as anyone else, on the other, she's terrified that public school teachers might reassure kids that the heterosexual and homosexual paths in life have equal moral value. She calls that "encouraging homosexuality" and uses phrases like "pushing homosexuality on our children." This led her to freak out over a PBS documentary called It's Elementary a study of elementary school student attitudes towards homosexuality aimed not at children but curious adults.

Since then she has flipped her wig over another PBS documentary about a group of single women in New York who do want to have children but don't (for various reasons) want to get married. The idea of single motherhood gives Dr. Laura hives (she's not too crazy about divorce either, often recommending that bad marriages stay together "for the children" as long as there's no physical abuse or danger). When one of the filmmakers remarked that he "admired" the women in his documentary and had learned to respect their characters despite negative stereotypes of single mothers, Dr. Laura became apoplectic. When a reviewer gave a positive review to the film, she accused him of "selling out" (presumably to some organization of super-rich single moms.)

Dr. Laura encourages parents to read their children's e-mail and to snoop around in their rooms, cracking open diaries, journals and love notes. She believes that people of different religions shouldn't marry unless one or the other is willing to convert. Dr. Laura is a throwback to a morally restrictive time, an era of tight codes of conduct and harsh legal punishments. She's one of those people who thinks that the 60s ruined America.

People in trailer parks and middle America call in to thank her, to praise her, to say "thank you for saying what I've always believed" and I get a little frightened because there's a movement going on, a misinformed moral movement put forward by the simple-minded, by people who mostly haven't gone to college or thought too deeply about philosophy and ethics, who haven't questioned their religious beliefs or those Absolute Truths which the thoughtful now stand on shaky ground.

Dr. Laura is mobilizing her minions for the culture war -- having them make angry phone calls to local PBS broadcasters and politicians, telling them to go out and stop the permissive 90s before the decade gives birth to a century of freedom. Meanwhile we liberals and civil rights advocates remain largely silent, hoping it will all amount to nothing.

Michael Maiello is a Liberal Elitist Snob out to destroy God, Patriotism, and Social Order.