Dr. Laura son linked to lurid Web page

Matthew D. LaPlante, The Salt Lake Tribune:The soldier son of talk radio relationship counselor Laura Schlessinger is under investigation for a graphic personal Web page that one Army official has called "repulsive."

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned "My Sweet Little Habib"; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

The site is credited to and includes many photographs of Deryk Schlessinger, the 21-year-old son of the talk radio personality known simply as Dr. Laura. Broadcast locally on 570 KNRS, "Family Values Talk Radio," the former family counselor spends three hours daily taking calls and offering advice on morals, ethics and values. She broadcast a show from Fort Douglas, in Salt Lake City, last week. ...

Deryk Schlessinger's Web site indicated the 21-year-old soldier is stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where, the site's author writes, "godless crazy people like me," have become "a generation of apathetic killers."

The site indicated Schlessinger's team has survived numerous mortar, rocket and roadside bomb attacks. It also included several graphic cartoons. In one of the stick drawings, a top-hatted man laughs as he rapes a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family. In another depiction, a man forces a boy to perform oral sex at knifepoint as the child's mother pleads for her son's life.

It's unclear who created the cartoons, but Army spokesman Robert Tallman said the drawings "are repulsive and not anywhere near being acceptable," for a soldier's personal Web page.

The Tribune learned of the Web page earlier this week from a former schoolmate of Deryk Schlessinger. Army officials said they were unaware of the site until alerted to its presence by the newspaper Thursday.

LSB: From Wikipedia: "Schlessinger is an outspoken critic of practices she feels are immoral and have become too prevalent in contemporary American culture. These include sex outside of marriage (sometimes referred to by her as "fooling around;" Schlessinger also often refers to women who have sex outside of marriage as "unpaid whores")], ... the viewing of pornography,…" Now that her son has been caught posting violent and pornographic images to the web, does she think he’s a deviant, or does she reserve that term only for gay people? Even young adults from the "best" homes (whatever those are) will occasionally do something stupid and thoughtless. Who among us hasn't? Add to that immaturity the experience of being in a war and one can understand (though not excuse) the behavior described above. I have to wonder, though, how this will affect Dr. Laura. Will she become less judgmental and become more tolerant? I doubt it. Her experience as an “unpaid whore” – here are the nude photos of Dr. Laura posted by her former boyfriend – and her subsequent rants about sex outside marriage would suggest she will continue to spout her hypocritical message. Why would this experience with her son be any different?