[driftless2]

What you said. Too many people (like the writer of this article) think they have some hidden knowledge or understanding nobody else possesses. I read "The Fountainhead" and saw the movie. I liked both. Full stop. I didn't become an Objectivist.

Rand was a flawed individual (like all of us) who was telling her readers and audience about the dangers of socialism. I tend to separate someone's personal life from many of their actions. The fact that facets of Rand's personal life were objectionable (no pun intended) means little to me.

[Springfield Reformer]

It isn't that she has some personal quirks that are separable from her core philosophy of life.  As Submareener says, it is like leaven.  The rotten philosophic center corrupts the whole.  

Consider for example Rand's views on abortion:

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?

From “Of Living Death”, The Voice of Reason, 58–59

Quoted from here:  http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/abortion.html

The premise is radical self-centrism, the absolute opposite of Christianity, in which we define love as the supreme good, and we define love in terms of making the other person more important than ourselves.  In the above quote Rand is deploying her core premise of radical selfishness as a very effective weapon against unborn persons.  Indeed, we could say that the radical left is using that very Randian logic to defend "abortion rights."  

So we cannot afford to give her philosophy a pass by trivializing her deviancies as merely "personal" issues.  They are a consistent and predictable outcome of her philosophy.  If you like aspects of what she said, that's fine. But if they appeal to you as a Judeo-Christian theist, you will find (if you dig at it a bit) that they are not built on the Randian premise, but on the theistic premise. In such a case Rand is merely borrowing what other, better, theistic thinkers have already said.

Peace,

SR