If Laura Schlessinger is a martyr for the First Amendment, then the Menendez brothers are poster children for orphanhood.

The brothers, you may recall, are serving life sentences for killing their parents in 1989. And while Dr. Laura didn't murder anyone, she did announce that she is killing off her own highly popular radio show because people didn't like her repeated use of a racial epithet in a conversation with a caller.

So it seems she who lives by the word, dies by the word. The N-word in this case.

Last week, a black woman married to a white man called the show. Her husband's friends and family frequently use the taboo word in her presence, and he doesn't call them on it. So she phoned "Dr. Laura," whose advice show has a huge following, to ask, in essence, if they were being racist. (Duh.)

The good doctor (of physiology) told her she was being oversensitive and there was nothing necessarily racist about the word, in part because black people use it among themselves all the time. She then repeated what she'd seen and heard on HBO, using word in question 11 times.

After the call, Dr. Laura apparently thought better of her remarks and issued an apology. She was wrong to use the word, she said, and her answer did not help the caller; she was sorry on both counts.

But the damage was done and an uproar ensued -- nothing new for Dr. Laura, who has enraged gays and lesbians by calling homosexuality a "biological error," and has pounded on mothers who work outside the home unless their income is critical for survival.

A few days after the racial incident, she went on Larry King's show to announce that she is ending her program at the end of the year.

"I want to regain my First Amendment rights," she told him.

Well, let's examine that First Amendment. It says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. So unless someone in the House or Senate has proposed a bill to shut her up, Dr. Laura has no reason to think her First Amendment right is in jeopardy.

Note, as well, that the First Amendment's language does not say that the speaker's comments must be met with universal approval. On the contrary, it guarantees critics the same right to call Dr. Laura a pinhead as she has to call them nitwits, as she frequently does, if not in so many words.

Furthermore, this is not a case of censorship, because the speaker in question owns her own show. There is nobody to fire Dr. Laura except Dr. Laura. If she is electing to quit her program, it's because she turned up the heat herself and then decided it was just too hot in there.

She's leaving the airwaves, she told Mr. King, because she's tired of sponsors and affiliates being threatened with boycotts and likened it to the silencing of dissent. Apparently, it's news to her that this is how the marketplace of ideas works in a capitalist democracy, where people vote with their dollars.

Citizen boycotts are a time-honored way for the little guys to make themselves heard. Usually they fail because they're tough to organize and tougher to maintain over a long period of time, but sometimes they have the desired effect. Image-conscious companies (or cowardly ones, depending on your point of view) may not want to be associated with controversy, and that, too, is their right.

Finally, the idea that Dr. Laura's socially conservative views are being "silenced" is laughable. Talk radio is rife with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck. Indeed, it often seems to be the sole province of reactionary hotheads. So the problem here is not the message; it's the messenger. She's been dishing it out for a long time, and now it seems she can't take it anymore.

As for her use of the dreaded N-word, Mr. King reminded her that while it may be OK for blacks, Jews, Hispanics or other groups to use certain words among themselves, it's not OK for outsiders to do the same. A person who makes her living with words surely understands that.

Having said all that, I should note that I sometimes agreed with Dr. Laura's advice. It's been years since her show was dropped from WPTT-AM (1360) in the Pittsburgh market, the only talk station I listened to. But when it was on, I would tune in on occasion just to see how the pathetically confused and clueless were faring. (It's now carried on WPIT- AM 730).

Inevitably, the answer was: not very well. Otherwise, they wouldn't be looking to a total stranger to solve their problems in between commercial breaks -- especially knowing her propensity to smack her callers upside the head with that two-by-four voice of hers.

"Gee Dr. Laura, my boyfriend has two children by two other women and they're always hounding him for child support. How can I get them to leave him alone so we can start our own family?"

No wonder her show has millions of listeners. There's a lot of entertainment value in hearing about other people's screwed-up lives. It makes our own seem so much better by comparison.

Maybe the talk show host really does mean to pack it in and concentrate on the rest of her empire -- books, Web, lectures etc. Or maybe this whole thin-skinned routine is just a ploy to get her fans riled up and demanding she stay on the air.

If that's the case, she should consider herself Mirandized: You have the right to remain caustic, but anything you say can and will be held against you in the court of public opinion.

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