It just goes to show that personal responsibility is everyone's favorite catchphrase... as long as it's everyone else's personal responsibility.

People talk about the evils of multinational corporations and then go on to buy all their crap anyway. People talk about how awful poverty is over their daily $6 cup of "peace" coffee. People criticize Abercrombie and Fitch-type stores of promoting shallow sexuality, but then they buy the made-in-Thailand Target knock-offs. "Health nuts" scowl at McDonalds but instead buy expensive soy milk and bottled water that was shipped 6000 miles to get to them.

We all do it... every single one of us is guilty. Unfortunately we take the attitude that we are a tiny cog in a giant machine, and our contribution is not only unavoidable but negligible. Worse, we live totally ignorant of our own propensity for waste and oppression, because we don't see the oppression but only the great deal on a sale price.

At some point, each and every individual is going to have to acknowledge that not only can we not continue living like this, but more importantly, we cannot continue to treat our life decisions as private choices with no effect on others. We must hold ourselves and each other accountable.

There are plenty of devout Christians who believe in gay rights and the dignity of people of various sexual orientation and identification.

There is a whole movement of Reconciling in Christ churches, including but not limited to Affirmation Methodist churches, Affirm United in Canada, Brethren Mennonite Council for LGBT Interests, Dignity/USA in the Roman Catholic church, Gay and Lesbian Acceptance (GALA) in the Community of Christ, Gay, Lesbian and Affirming Disciples (GLAD) Alliance, Integrity of the Episcopalian church, More Light Presbyterians, Reconciling Ministries Network of the United Methodists, and of course the Reconciling in Christ movement of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

I realize this is not the topic at hand, but people discussing homosexuality should be aware that there is no right-wing Christian consensus on the moral status of homosexuality. A lot of us Christians are fighting for the rights and acceptance of our gay, lesbian, bi and transgendered family just as secular people are....

"Ta-ta for now."

I laughed out loud.

Not all guys love huge breasts. I find myself mostly attracted to women with smallish chests.

I can't even imagine lugging around that amount of weight on my chest, though. Kudos to those of you who put up with it, and especially to those of you who have to put up with jerks who feel like it's their right to stare or ask questions or touch....

Rudy Giuliani, dogged by tacky ethics questions, seems in contrast like a shadowy, hard-bitten wheeler and dealer, like Hillary Clinton a ruthless pursuer of power for its own sake.

Don't people even bother to edit these things for clarity? I am quite certain an extra comma, or perhaps a new sentence, is required for that blurb to make sense.

Otherwise I will just chime in with the voices who continue to question Paglia's continuing presence on Salon.com. Very few people in this world are able to make a living by being self-important, pompous ideologues. I wouldn't think Salon would want to be responsible for making yet another such lifestyle possible.

"Introverts will like being stay-at-home parents, (or stay-at-home anythings.)

Extroverts will suffer from it."

Amazing how two simple sentences can cut through mountains of yakety-yak, straight to the truth.

Cut straight to the truth? The truth is introversion and extroversion have nothing to do with desire to "stay at home" in any capacity. If anything, introverts would be far more likely to hate raising children, because an introvert needs several hours of solitude to recharge and recover from extended periods of human contact. That is the definition of an introvert: A person for whom human contact is not energizing, but actually exhausting.

Being in constant contact with people, and especially children, 24/7 is one of the most horrifying prospects a true introvert can face.

It's remarkable how ethnocentric or perhaps class-centric the entire idea of the SAHM is. There are millions of people, both mothers and fathers, for whom staying at home is not and never will be a financial option. Only the upper middle class, which until very recently only included white people, has ever been able to afford one adult doing, essentially, nothing. Even historically this has been the case: Throughout Western history, even when women don't have 'jobs' per se, mothers were always a factor in the household economy. They worked the fields with their husbands, managed the home's expenses, and often created goods such as woven cloth to sell and supplement the family income.

Children, furthermore, were regarded as financial assets as well. The primary reason for having lots of children was because they could perform labor from a relatively young age. Very much unlike children of today, historically, children have "paid their way" in labor after about the age of 8. Trust me, if families needed children to help them survive economically, they certainly needed the work of their matriarchs.

So this whole notion of SAHMs as some sort of universal, normative feature of womanhood is absolutely ridiculous. Only in conditions of extreme affluence, which is a relatively recent development in human history, have women even had the option of "staying at home." The truth is, we are universally descended from a very long and storied tradition of working moms.

Unfortunately introverts are among the least understood minorities in the world. People continue to treat introversion as though it were some kind of social disease... growing up, I can't begin to tell you how many times I was told I "needed" to be more outgoing (ironically, when it came to discussions of substance, I was the most outgoing by far). People act as though being introverted is a personality flaw, when in reality a disproportionately large number of the great thinkers and doers in our world have been introverts.