average life

I lot of people I know really like the sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, especially his most famous book, Ender’s Game.  As someone who enjoys reading (accessible) sci-fi, it’s been recommended to me time and time again, but I will never read this book.  I’m sure it’s great, but I can’t support Mr. Card’s writing, because I can’t support Mr. Card.

Orson Scott Card is a homophobe.  I don’t use that word lightly and disagree most of the time when someone is labeled a homophobe.  But he is.  Even worse is that he is the most dangerous kind of homophobe – the kind who doesn’t think he is one.  Self admitted homophobes will spew forth disgusting, degrading comments and may even act violently against gay people, but they are easily dismissed as “extreme” and “irrational”.  Mr. Card’s brand of homophobia is more dangerous because it lulls people into a attitude of intolerance and bigotry all the while convincing themselves that they are not only in the right, but acting and speaking out of some form of “tough love”.

It’s really disappointing, too.  Mr. Card has written some beautiful things, including his “Holding onto the ‘others’” article in the Mormon Times.  In this essay, he lament’s Mormon culture’s tendency to ostracize its nerdy and intellectual kids, ignoring them until they find their place in academia, often to leave the church behind.  It’s a poignant piece that obviously has some deep personal connection for him and has for several people I know, including me.  Unfortunately, however, this same man wrote an essay which included:

And if acceptable ways can be found to protect children from developing this reproductive dysfunction before it even manifests itself, or to shape society so as to encourage the least affected to achieve reproductive success — i.e., evolutionary normality — why would we not want to assure that the children we bear would be free of this dysfunction?
“Science on gays falls short”

How would it feel to be fourteen, gay, Mormon and read something like this?  I’ll tell you, it doesn’t make you feel very good about yourself.  I guess in his efforts to protect the nerdy kids from passive rejection, he’s also decided to actively reject and alienate the queer kids.  Accept the smart kids, try like hell to fix the gay ones, I guess.

It also is very frustrating his persistant coupling of homosexuality with pedophilia.  Twitter is all a rumble about the republishing of his novella, Hamlet’s Father.  In retelling of the Shakespeare play, Hamlet’s father is a gay pedophile who molested all of Hamlet’s friends which (of course) turned them all gay as well.  In a criticism of gay twins studies, Mr. Card suggested that the increased likelihood for twins to both be gay (2x for fraternal, 5x for identical) was that the similar appearance of the children would influence their likelihood of being molested, if they are attractive.  The unstated assumption is that the molestation, of course, would turn them gay:

The study does not allow for the possibility that the physical appearance of the subjects might have played a role. If seduction, molestation, or other sexual trauma contributes to homosexuality, and if those are influenced by the perceived attractiveness of the subject to a molester, seducer, or rapist, then the greater physical resemblance between identical twins may account for some of the results.
“Science on gays falls short”

C’mon, that’s messed up.

Of course, this would be less maddening of Mr. Card, a National Organization for Marriage board member, didn’t constantly try and convince us that he doesn’t have a problem with gay people, insisting he has more of a centrist role, “I suppose I can take some comfort from the fact that over the years I have been savaged both for showing too much sympathy for the ‘abomination’ of homosexuality and for showing too much ‘homophobic’ opposition to the political agenda of the radical homosexual community.”   He even asserts that:

“The hypocrites of homosexuality are, of course, already preparing to answer these statements by accusing me of homophobia, gay-bashing, bigotry, intolerance; but nothing that I have said here — and nothing that has been said by any of the prophets or any of the Church leaders who have dealt with this issue — can be construed as advocating, encouraging, or even allowing harsh personal treatment of individuals who are unable to resist the temptation to have sexual relations with persons of the same sex.”
“The Hypocrites of Homosexuality“

This is from an essay in which he encourages the illegalization of homosexuality, being a threat to civilized society.  He repeats that homosexuality should not be met with violence and seems to make a effort to prove he doesn’t hate gays by using the fact that he brushed on the topic of homosexuality in his story, Songmaster, which, again, couples homosexuality with child molestation.

Mr. Card was a vocal advocate for the passing of Prop 8 in California, during which he wrote an article saying:

“However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. They are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is. They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes.”
“Homosexual ‘Marriage’ and Civilization”

Somehow is a legal gay marriage not only less valid to him, but it takes away from the validity of his own marriage.  If you’ll forgive a C.S. Lewis quote (who, in turn was quoted by President Ezra Taft Benson in his 1989 Conference talk):

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. ? It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.”
Mere Christianity

I’m going to move on from that one.

In the end, I really don’t care what Orson Scott Card thinks about me.  I’m almost 30 years old and my self esteem doesn’t hinge on the illogical writings of a YA sci-fi novelist, but I do denounce him on the basis that he is a YA sci-fi novelist.  YA as in Young Adult as in read by kids and teenagers.  Some of whom are nerdy.  Some of whom read his “Holding onto the ‘others'” essay with tears in their eyes longing for those in their ward to recognize them, too.  Longing to be accepted for who they are, as he calls for.  Some of whom are also gay and read his other writings that say that being gay is something to be fixed, that a gay relationship is, by nature, inferior to a straight relationship.  This gay nerdy kid who will make the very, very short leap to assume that he, by nature, is inferior to a straight person.

I’m hoping this gay, nerdy, Mormon kid will find his or her way over to the It Gets Better Project and watch video after video of successful, happy gay people urging that kid to just hold on, that it will get better, that they will eventually find people who will love them for who they are.

Orson Scott Card is wrong.