Dr. Laura: All Is Fair in Syndication

It’s no secret a lot of gay people work in the entertainment industry. It’s also no secret media conglomerates, like other companies, place a high priority on profits.

No one should be surprised, then, that Paramount would market a new TV program hosted by Dr. Laura Schlessinger--the nationally syndicated radio personality who has angered part of Hollywood, gay and straight, with her increasingly strident stance toward homosexuality.

Even so, the decision has left some of the more politically aware producers, executives and actors affiliated with Paramount and its corporate parent, Viacom, feeling a bit betrayed.

“What gay person working for Paramount could be happy about this?” said Joe Keenan, an Emmy-winning writer-producer on “Frasier,” which has contributed several hundred million dollars on the studio’s balance sheet. “We feel the way the Von Trapp children would feel if Dad decided to divorce Maria and marry Joan Crawford. She’s not a happy addition to the family.”

“I can’t imagine Paramount would be syndicating an openly anti-Semitic or anti-African American talk-show host,” added another producer based at the studio.

In the wake of such reaction, Paramount officials have agreed to meet next month with representatives of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, affording them an opportunity to voice their concerns.

“All we’re asking is to be heard up front, while they’re still developing this,” said GLAAD executive director Joan Garry. “It’s really to educate them, to give them the full picture of who she is and the kind of things she’s saying.”

Schlessinger declined to be interviewed directly but agreed to fax responses to certain questions. Her spokeswoman, Keven Bellows, insisted Schlessinger is not anti-gay and has been painted that way by activists in an attempt to silence her.

Like GLAAD, Keenan stressed that is not the goal. “The remedy for speech is more speech,” he said.

Via fax, Schlessinger said homosexuality is “against the moral precepts of Judaism. This is what informs my views and not prejudice.”

Yet Schlessinger’s on-air pronouncements merely adorn prejudice in a cloak of religion and morality. Railing against the Vermont Supreme Court decision that would grant same-sex couples benefits and protections associated with marriage, she said society “should discriminate against certain behaviors,” homosexuality among them.

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She has called homosexuality “deviant” and “a biological error.” She has stated it is “a terrible sadness that these people cannot relate to the opposite sex.” She has advocated “therapies”--rejected by authorities with doctorates in psychiatry as opposed to physiology, as hers is--capable of “helping people leave their homosexuality and attain a heterosexual life.”

“We believe her words give people permission to put an entire group of people in a second-class place,” Garry said, adding that GLAAD’s goal is for Schlessinger to “curtail her defamatory vocabulary” and provide more balance instead of selectively quoting dubious research by groups pushing an anti-gay agenda.

Though Paramount officials will meet with GLAAD, Frank Kelly, president of programming for the syndication unit, declined comment, which is difficult to understand: Shouldn’t studio brass support Schlessinger’s freedom to express her views, whatever they may be, if they’re willing to put their logo on her show?

Then again, perhaps one shouldn’t expect great courage from a unit that waved the white flag of surrender in 1996 when actor George Clooney threatened to boycott “Entertainment Tonight” due to the intrusive antics of video “stalkerazzi” on the sister Paramount series “Hard Copy.” Kelly wrote the star saying the tabloid show would not cover him in the future, prompting Clooney to suggest “Soft Copy” might be a more appropriate title.

Scheduled to premiere next fall, the format of Schlessinger’s new program has been kept under wraps. Paramount has promised more details at the National Assn. of Television Program Executives convention later this month. Schlessinger indicated the TV show will also deal with questions of morality while exploring a wider range of issues than her radio show.

Lured by her radio popularity, broadcasters across the country--including the CBS-owned TV stations, among them KCBS locally--have agreed to carry the series sight unseen. Schlessinger will thus appear on many of the same stations as Howard Stern, having once passed on doing a TV show through CBS in part because she objected to Stern’s late-night program.

While CBS’ merger with Viacom is awaiting government approval, Schlessinger’s new corporate “family” already includes MTV, Beavis and Butt-head, “South Park” and the “Friday the 13th” films, to name a few.

Oh, and did we mention Paramount offers benefits to same-sex domestic partners, as do all of the major studios?

Still, Schlessinger said she is “delighted” to be working with Paramount, and no wonder: In doing so, she gains the backing of a company possessing vast clout among TV stations. In turn, Paramount dives into the turbulent syndication waters tethered to a personality heard on more than 400 radio outlets.

Perhaps the most telling question is what Schlessinger would do if the son she regularly discusses on air (she’s one of those celebrity parents who has no qualms about dragging her kid into the act, a la Kathie Lee Gifford) announced one day that he’s gay. Would she suggest he seek therapy? Tell him it’s terribly sad? Love him any less?

“I wouldn’t have to tell him anything, because he attends a Hebrew Academy and is an observant Jew, who knows that Judaism forbids acting out sexually with a member of the same gender,” she faxed, which should be of interest to all the Jewish gay people out there. That said, she added that her son’s sexual orientation “would in no way affect my feelings for him, nor my responsibility to him as his parent.”

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To be clear, Schlessinger has every right to express her views--just as gays and lesbians at Paramount have every right to feel outraged their employer is helping provide her a vast new forum, and just as TV’s creative community has every right to consider whether they want to align themselves with a studio that does so.

Of course, don’t look for that to happen. Not only has media consolidation limited employment options for actors, writers and directors, but as Keenan noted, there is little to be gained by ceding the megaphone to Schlessinger and her ilk.

Which, as poor Maria might say, brings us back to “Do,” and this simple observation: Nowadays, even Dr. Laura must get accustomed to strange bedfellows--a term, in this case, which has nothing to do with gender, loyalty or principle and everything to do with cold, hard cash.

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Brian Lowry’s column appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached by e-mail at brian.lowry@latimes.com.