Laura Ingraham Has Been Terrorizing Students Since College, When She Outed Classmates
Laura Ingraham is in the crosshairs this week after taunting Marjory Stoneman Douglas survivor David Hogg. But the right-wing talk show host has decades of bullying behavior on her resume, particularly against the LGBT community.
In 2015, Ingraham said providing transition-related care to trans children was tantamount to "child abuse." She also told her audience she no longer allowed her daughter to use public restrooms and suggested listeners wear adult diapers to avoid encountering trans people in the bathroom.
It goes as far back as college: As a student at Dartmouth in the 1980s, Ingraham became editor of the conservative Dartmouth Review. At one point, she directed a reporter to infiltrate a meeting of the campus LGBT group and record students' conversations. She then published the transcript, outing many of them to classmates, and sent tapes of the meetings to the students’ parents.
In the article, she called association “cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites" and later defended the outings as a "freedom of the press issue."
Dartmouth English professor Jeffrey Hart, the faculty adviser for the Review, says Ingraham had "the most extreme anti-homosexual views imaginable," going so far as to avoid a restaurant where she was afraid the waiters were gay.
In 1997 a The Washington Post op-ed, Ingraham announced she had changed her views on homosexuality, after witnessing "the dignity, fidelity, and courage" with which her gay brother Curtis coped with AIDS.
That didn't stop her from suggesting marriage equality would lead to incest, though: “I think we’ve moved on beyond gay marriage to transgenderism and then, maybe, polyamory," she told listeners. "Maybe some type of incestuous relationship will be validated by the state as long as it’s not consummated. Right? I mean, who knows?”
Ingraham's latest abuse hit her in the pocketbook, as Hogg's call for a boycott of The Ingraham Angle has cost the show numerous advertisers. She offered a weak apology on Twitter, though not on her radio show or Fox News.
"Laura Ingraham's cowardly, public bullying of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is consistent with her vile views including her ongoing targeting of the LGBTQ community,” said GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis in a statement.
"From hateful remarks about marriage equality and the transgender community to attacking youth activists and the communities we lock arms with, advertisers must question if they want to be associated with her fringe opinions.”