Bad advice from Dear Abby

I am beginning to think that Dear Abby gives deliberately bad advice. Every time I look, the advice is incredibly wacky.

Today a parent wrote that his 16-year-old daughter was temporarily upset, and when he quizzed her about it, she said that she was gay. Dear Abby advises him that he needs to accept her orientation as an established fact, and that he should join a pro-lesbian lobbying organization that promotes the myth that a homosexual orientation can never be changed.

This is wacky. A girl does not get temporarily upset about being gay. Adolescent girls do often get confused and upset about a lot of different things, and some of those could cause them to be a little mixed up about their sexuality. This parent needs to get to the root of the problem. It is much more likely that she had a bad date, or suffered rejection, or is just going thru an odd phase, or something else. It is impossible for her to know that she is a lesbian if she has never even had a sexual experience.

Another letter writer complains that her retired mother spend a lot of time on the internet, and sends her 5 emails a day with jokes and other entertaining finds. She thinks that this is burdensome, and wants to politely tell her mother not to send her email. Dear Abby says that her mother must be told not to send so much email!

Other people have mothers who call on the telephone at all hours of the day and night, who visit unannounced, who stay for weeks at a time, who intrude on their social lives, who manipulate their spouses, who spoil their children, etc. This mother just sends 5 emails a day! Only the most miserable and ungrateful person could possibly object to 5 emails a day from her mother.