When oh when will Salon weary of your column? Your predictable provocations are as reliable as Madonna's pre-concert tour outrages. Please Salon, get a real columnist!

you continue to be incredibly tone deaf in your scattershot approach to the issues. palinoia is not about "veddy veddy proper english," it's about stringing thoughts together in a coherent, intelligent way. you don't have to use big words or complex sentences to do that. you just have to make sense. and it's not just how she talks, it's what she says when she opens her mouth. it somewhat restored my respect for mccain, for example, to learn that he refused to stoop so low as to air the most heinous jeremiah wright ad during the campaign. would palin have blanched at spouting whatever lie might win her an election? i thought not.

meanwhile, your take on the gay rights issue is plain out of date. yes, it's wrong to indiscriminately confront every church of every religion in response to the passage of prop 8 and other such absurd laws. but direct confrontation and engagement with those of differing views is absolutely essential. anything else is waiting patiently on the back of the bus for the political winds to change-- which, without said confrontation, they never will.

ALSO -- i scanned your column in vain for mention of the obama birth cert. brouhaha. last time, i remember, you made a point of lending credence to this lunacy by wondering aloud about the obama camp's "reluctance" to disprove the lingering rumors. in the wake of the supreme court ruling and the fringe movement's strident wackiness, i see that you've abandoned ship.

you are nothing but an empty shell, looking to sail in whatever tiny slipstream of opinion and controversy you can find -- as long as it's relatively safe.

It is always about how someone presents him or herself in the media—especially on television—that matters. It's really pretty tiresome. It doesn't matter, to Camille Paglia, what Sarah Palin says, it's how she says it, and the persona she's projecting. It doesn't matter if the persona's an affectation. It doesn't matter if the persona is COMPLETELY undermined by that person's actions. It's all about representations.

I live in CA, and I protested after Prop 8 was passed. I walked in the streets and carried a sign. Is that the same thing as invading a church and knocking a eucharist out of someone's hand? Why is the protest movement and gay rights movement equated to the most radical, isolated, violent act?

Why is it "juvenile" to want equal marriage rights? And why is it that because SOME gay couples have an open relationship then therefore NO gay couples should want marriage?

Civil unions have substantially fewer rights than marriages. The Supreme Court of CA decided that instead of increasing rights to civil unions and making them identical to marriages (separate but equal) that marriage should be legal for gay couples. It was the SC not "juvenile gay activists" who set the state for the battle over prop 8 being about gay marriage instead of civil unions.

And why does Paglia seem to have such disdain for Salon's core readers "urban professionals" and "college graduates." It reeks of the same classism and disdain that she laments in her Yale peers.

...academia.

"What do the Clintons have on Obama?" This is not journalism, it is just a smear. Paglia does not claim that she has evidence for a quid pro quo, but she says it's there anyway. Then she follows up by a slur on liberals, accusing them in words that could have come from Fox news of believing that "jihadism can be defeated by reason and happy talk." Why does Salon carry Paglia's columns, which are consistently impressionistic, shallow, and thoughtless?

Does she have scandalous photos of Joan or what? Surly you ten-year-old niece could write better than this drivel.

aaarrrrgggg.

It's gotta be something good. Otherwise, there's no way you'd keep publishing such pretentious garbage by this ridiculous fraud....

Oh, the Clintons are just terrible. Nobody could ask Hilary to be Secretary of State because she's smart and tough. It either has to be a gambit on Obama's part to get rid of them once and for all, or they have blackmail material on him (the blogs say so!) which they didn't get in time for the primaries. Camille thinks the Clintons are useless - she's told us over and over again - so everybody else must, also.

That's called projection.

And Sarah Palin, she's so wonderful! Who cares that she couldn't even answer a question about what newspapers she read? It's not what she says, it's the wonderful, exuberant cadences of it all. Content and sense be hanged! Dick Cavett's opinions can be dismissed because, after all, he lives in "the chichi Hamptons," and he went to Yale where, once, decades ago, an Anglo-Saxon professor said something that Camille found insensitive (and is still glaringly angry about).

Camille, you are right: language has changed in the last 50 years. It has mutated and branched, in wild and wonderful ways. But as part of this, we've developed multiple standards: one set for how you talk to your friends, and one for job interviews, and one for debates for national office. The fact that Palin's comments, which very often simply avoided the questions being asked while representing her as a martyr simply for being asked, is "closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class," doesn't impress (or arouse) me. If Barack Obama had used language "closer to street rapping," he wouldn't have had a chance in hell.

As for gay activists, responding to a vote in which the equal rights of a minority group were taken away by a majority (there are terms for this; "tyranny of the majority" is one of the polite ones), surely they should never do anything to "split the Democratic coalition." Oddly, however, this advice is never given to anyone else in the Democratic coalition, which included many people who didn't support and/or voted against equality for gays.

Of course it doesn't really matter, because we have Camille to tell us that marriage isn't really appropriate for the authentic gay male relationships that she understands better than the gay males themselves. (Let's not talk about lesbians.) And, of course, it would be far better for gays to pursue the virtually impossible political task of getting the U.S. state governments to stop issuing marriage certificates, rather than simply fighting for equal rights under the law.

And gays shouldn't say anything angry or untoward about the Mormon Church. The LDS may have recreated itself as an anti-gay PAC, deciding that it was more important to stop gays from getting legal equality than it was to spend $30 million dollars on - oh, I don't know - feeding the hungry and housing the poor (you know, "Christian" stuff), they may have told lies, they may have basically threatened their members with damnation if they didn't pony up to stop the gays (from having what the Mormons already had, and will continue to). But you see, they're a RELIGION, no matter what they do, and Camille respects religions far more than she respects her fellow atheists, her fellow secularists, and her fellow homosexuals.