Card’s economy-sized jug of crazy sauce
Orson Scott Card has created hisself some kind of internet firestorm with his online column for The Mormon Times in which he draws a line in the sand against same-sex marriage because, you know, allowing gay marriage “marks the end of democracy in America.”
Others have already performed the necessary takedowns. I heartily recommend Ed Brayton’s exposé of Card’s faulty legal logic and John Scalzi’s dissection of the dishonesty at the heart of activists opposed to gay marriage (which is also, by the way, whence this post’s irresistible title comes).
But I would just like to transpose two of Card’s statements, separated in Card’s op-ed by some 1,500 words:
Please remember that for the mildest of comments critical of the political agenda of homosexual activists, I have been called a “homophobe” for years.
This is a term that was invented to describe people with a pathological fear of homosexuals — the kind of people who engage in acts of violence against gays.
…followed by a chapter’s worth of blather, after which comes…
How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.
That’s right, folks. Card is not homophobic, merely sympathetic towards violent uprising against that “mortal enemy,” the US government, to prevent same-sex marriage. But, no, no, it’s not homophobia. And it’s not a call to extralegal violence, either. It would be entirely unfair of anyone to accuse Card of inciting violence because such things just don’t happen all that often. It’s just, um, constitutional conservatism, that’s what, just like the constitutional conservatism of, erm, South Carolina in, say, 1860, give or take.
I would also note that while Card may believe that marriage has only One True definition, he belongs to a church that changed its One True definition of marriage back in 1876, and belongs to a nation in which several states used different One True definitions of marriage up until 1967. I would also note that Card’s objections to same-sex marriage could, with a few keyword subsitutions, read almost exactly the same as the objections to interracial marriage that succeeded in several Alabama Supreme Court cases in the late 1870s. And those Alabama anti-miscegenation laws were supported by Democrats and opposed by Republicans. All of which just goes to show that things change, even for conservative churches and political parties.
Go suck on the facts, Mr Card. Even a Jehoshaphat claqueur like yourself should understand that it’s better than having people suck on a gun barrel just because they can see through your personal cognitive dissonances.
5 People have left comments on this post
I found you through your comment on Justine Larbelastier’s site and wanted to thank you for pointing more towards the Kessel article on Card. Very interesting reading. Certainly changed my point of view towards Ender’s Game.
Mr. Card won’t be finding any of his books on my wish list anytime soon.
Thanks for the comments, C.B. One of the things I liked about Kessel’s essay was it gave me the insight to see why I had hated Card’s Ender books so much. I really disliked Speaker for the Dead and despised Xenocide with a passion. But I couldn’t put my finger on it until I’d read Kessel’s piece.
“Jehoshaphat claqueur”
Genius, right there.
I enjoyed the two books of the Ender series I read, although I generally don’t look at things too deeply and I’m not much of a political or social commentator (and I did think that Ender himself was a bit of a tosser).
But three paragraphs into Card’s article is this:
“require marriage to be defined in ways that were unthinkable through all of human history until the past 15 years”
Huh? Hey what? *unthinkable* through *ALL* of human history? I haven’t even read the other responses to this article, and already it’s lost a massive amount of credibility. Shouldn’t that read “all of human history, well, the conservative bits anyway, and the ones that are mostly based on the Old Testament and some forms of marriage contract that were used for political and social alliances – just ignore all those other cultures and less formal arrangements for now as they aren’t convenient to my opinion”? Or is it just me?
Trowzers, Mr Card suffers from that all-too-common affliction that makes one believe that one’s own moral principles are self-evident and timeless. Mr Card can’t be so ignorant of the world as to actually think that until 1993 marriage has been defined at all times and in all cultures as a relationship between one man and one woman. Mr Card is obviously unaware of the documented homosexual marriages in ancient China, Greece, and Rome. (The Roman right to homosexual marriage was rescinded in AD 342; there would have been no need rescind a law that did not already exist.) To be fair, not many people know these facts, but as I pointed out, Mr Card’s appeal to the timeless definition of marriage is not even true of his own church and his own nation. This must be a case of overwhelming cognitive dissonance leading to the paralysis of Mr Card’s critical appraisal pathways.