Granted, magazines do not need to adhere so closely to standards of objectivity, but this word pretty much devalued the good research in the article as no more than a wordy personal attack on Starhawk, or a demonstration of bigotry towards the religion of Wicca. Backlash was a term coined to refer to the gradual undoing of the feminist movement of the 60s. Paganism was a backlash to the backlash in some ways, creating a religion that venerated women as a response to the re-suppression. Unfortunately, some people embracing this turned out to be as mysogamist as the mysogynists. Wicca is not a literalist religion.
Myth is metaphor.
Metpahor has truth to it, encoded in symbols. Many of my personal religious philosophies center around recognizing mythology as a way of relaying concepts about the human condition and the nature of divinity in metaphors so that the information can retain its value even as times change so much that the setting of the myth is unrecognizable. A myth is a story that lasts for thousands of years. Many intperet this as a disrespect or disbelief in the icons and stories of the Christian belief system.