Wow--I would LOVE to have a Paglia-free Premium subscription. Also free of Broadsheet. Then I could feel like my money was supporting the best of Salon, not the worst of it. And then you could find out what your readers REALLY want and don't want.

A couple of people refuted this article quite thoroughly, one producing a line by line refutation, with substance and clarity. So far the editors who select the "Editor's Choice" letters are ignoring these letters. What does that say about Salon's commitment to honest discussion of controversial issues?

Here's an inconvenient truth for you. Did you know that Al Gore did not write or produce "An Inconvenient Truth"? This documentary has 9 producers listed in IMDB, none being Al Gore or any of his family members. The movie was directed by Davis Guggenheim and edited by Jay Cassidy and Dan Swietlik. The film was originally inspired when one of the producers, Laurie Lennard, saw Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation about Global Warming and she pressed her husband and friends to make a documentary about Al Gore and his work. By all accounts, Al Gore did not want the movie to be about him--he wanted to focus entirely on the subject he's devoted so much of his life to for so many decades. It was the moviemakers' decision to frame the movie as they did. But make no mistake: Al Gore's work is the SUBJECT of the documentary, he is not the documentary maker. Calling "An Inconvenient Truth" "Al Gore's movie" is like calling "Gone with the Wind" "Scarlett O'Hara's movie."

If Ms. Paglia can't separate the subject of a movie from its creator, perhaps she has as little expertise in film as she does in science.

I am an authority on one topic. I have a great many opinions about a great many other topics, about which I'd be more than happy to enlighten your readers, and perhaps some would enjoy reading them. And perhaps not. Either way, I would trust that the decision-making process on your editorial board about whether to run these opinions would have far more to do with my credibility than whether I could inflate my prose to blowhard levels.

Camille Paglia may be an authority on something--frankly, it's hard to tell. Real authorities on subjects I'm familiar with tend to quote other authorities far more often than they quote themselves--it's desperate tenure-track wannabes who inflate their own discoveries in hopes that somebody important will notice them. When real authorities make new discoveries, as Isaac Newton noted, they're seeing so far because they stand on the shoulders of giants. Ms. Paglia is far too busy shouting "Look at me! Look at me! I wrote a 700-page book! I know more than everybody!" to notice even the biggest giants.

Many times over the years I've thought that her complex prose masks an underlying ignorance of her subjects. This time, because I do have expertise in one major corner of this subject, I know it. In my narrow field of expertise, there is a genuine and wide consensus about global warming. In her usual self-aggrandizing way, Ms. Paglia exposes her ignorance and lack of authority for all to see. She's jumped the shark.

It's sad and frustrating that with Salon's limited budget they provide a forum for such an eminently quotable ignoramus.

I'd love to see evidence of a scientific consensus promoting GM crops. It simply does not exist, and as far as I've been able to determine, except for scientists getting paid by the corporations getting rich via GM, the majority of scientists seem to be on the same side of the debate as environmentalists.

Ma Ingalls did "stay at home," but so did Pa--they lived on and worked on a farm. Was she home with the children? So was he--children quickly learned to do field work, and were as likely to be out helping Pa as Ma. And when Laura Ingalls grew up, she worked, as a teacher. The richest family in town, the shopkeepers, had two working parents--the mother and father both worked in the store.

In my recollection of "Little Women," while Mr. March (a minister) was off as a chaplain in the Civil War, Mrs. March was busy doing something--not earning much money, but they did have Hannah to do the housework, and Mrs. March was always gone until suppertime.

So I don't think Louisa May Alcott or Laura Ingalls Wilder's experiences are a compelling counter to the claim that before the 1950s, few women were "stay at home" mothers.

Being a person whose career ambitions revolved around doing good for humans and birds while making enough money to pay my bills, I spent a lot of time at home when my children were small, earning my income at writing and speaking gigs. The only "stay-at-home" parents in my neighborhood were me and a friend who was a fire fighter--he worked 24-hour shifts every 2-3 days, and was otherwise at home. (His wife worked a more normal job.) He and I swapped off on childcare.

Even though I was home, I was very busy with my low-paying but fulfilling work and my kids. Once when my mother-in-law and I visited a friend of hers and brought some cookies, her friend asked, "Oh, Laura--did you make these?" Before I could say a word, my mother-in-law, who had not held a paying job since she had her first child in 1948, said, "Laura has way more important things to do with her life than sit around baking cookies."

That's why I chuckle reading anything about people disparaging working or stay-at-home mothers or fathers. There are way too many complexities to define anyone into such a narrow category. And for some reason, in my life the only people I ever hear even debating what other women or men should do with their lives are writing for the media. Real people are (or should be) too busy living their lives to be judging others.