"She also got her husband to leave his then-wife-and-family for her. Not much of a role model."
Ahhh .... didn't know this. I've read the book the Cult of Ayn Rand, but I don't recall this gem of a detail in there. What I do recall was that her husband from the very beginning was perfectly content to be witness and non protesting while she did her 'thing' w/ her inner circle, esp Branden.
This husband leaving wife AND kids tid bit ... do you have a source? For it is Rand's relationship to children I have always found to be the key point of focus when discussing her 'philosophy'...
"do you have a source?"
I stand corrected. You are right in that my account was NOT accurate but she certainly was a whack-job in her personal life and didn't have a problem with trying to break up marriages, as the below excerpts from
this web page show:
"Rand certainly tried to exercise a superrationalistic control in her own life, with disastrous results: Her psychological understanding of people, and even of herself, was clearly and gravely limited. Thus she engineered the marriage between Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, even though (according to Barbara, in The Passion of Ayn Rand) they weren't all that attracted to each other -- their unease was "irrational" to Rand. Then she decided that she and Nathaniel should have some sort of "rational" love affair, like characters in her novels. That Nathaniel was not comfortable with that, especially since they were both already married, does not seem to have mattered. When he finally refused to continue their relationship, Rand furiously expelled him from her "movement" and then scuttled the "movement" itself. That was, curiously, all for the better, since under her control the Objectivist movement was taking on more and more of the authoritarian or totalitarian overtones of the very ideologies it was supposedly opposing.
In another incident, related by the columnist Samuel Francis, when Rand learned that the economist Murray Rothbard's wife, Joey, was a devout Christian, she all but ordered that if Joey did not see the light and become an atheist in six months, Rothbard, who was an agnostic, must divorce her. Rothbard never had any intention of doing anything of the sort, and this estranged him from Rand, who found such "irrational" behavior intolerable. "