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I'd like to formally introduce readers to a writer I only "met" this past year. (I've linked to her in this and other previous posts.) I have read her regularly enough to know that on many "issues" and religious beliefs we are polar opposites, and some who read here may find her candor in other venues a bit too... well... candid.

But Paglia is the most winsome liberal I read, and what makes her so is the kindness she shows to those with whom she disagrees. One could almost get the impression that she holds in higher regard thinking conservatives who can express an honest opinion than she does liberals who spend their energies bashing conservatives to heights of hypocrisy.

More and more I like this Camille Paglia.

Here is a link to her current op-ed. You'll probably be able to detect the points on which she and I disagree, but I think you'll find her an honest observer of the political and cultural landscape who is unafraid to take on hollow men and women of her generation with opening statements like: "Until I see stronger evidence, I will continue to believe that climate change is primarily driven by solar phenomena."

Her Salon articles are typically three-or-four-pages long each week, but rest assured each page is as interesting as the first.

On page three of this week's thoughts, she speaks somewhat to the point I was making in "Wrong-ophobia" (though she avoids any moral conclusion):

"After the American Psychiatric Association, responding to activist pressure, removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, psychological inquiries into homosexuality slowly became verboten. To even ask about the origins of homosexuality was automatically dubbed homophobic by gay studies proponents in the '80s and '90s. Weirdly, despite the rigid social constructionist bias that permeated the entire left, gay activists in and out of academe now leapt on the slightest evidence that could suggest a biological cause of homosexuality.... Yet the intricate family dynamic of every single gay person I've ever known seems to have played some kind of role in his or her developing sexual orientation....But retrospective psychohistory is out these days, and the only game in town is pin the tail on the oppressor."