News, analysis and fact-checking of anti-gay rhetoric
Posts 
Posts via daily email:
The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.Orson Scott Card Joins NOM Board
Jim Burroway
April 21st, 2009
The National Organization for Marriage — the folks who brought you the much-mocked “Gathering Storm” ad — have taken on a real nutcase as the newest member of their board of directors. Joining the board and representing the LDS church is science fiction author and Mormon Times columnist Orson Scott Card. He replaces Matthew Holland, who is the son of a member of the LDS church’s Quorum of the Twelve, who recently stepped down from the board.
Last summer, Orson Scott Card called for the overthrow of civil government if California’s Proposition 8 had failed. Writing for the Mormon Times, he said:
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 …
In 2004, Card tried to address the argument that same-sex marriage would somehow diminish his marriage. That’s an argument that many anti-gay activists have had a hard time articulating. Most would concede, “Well, of course it wouldn’t affect my marriage,” but Card was game to give the argument a go. Claiming to have “gay friends” of his own, this is what he came up with:
But homosexual “marriage” is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society — to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.
So if my friends insist on calling what they do “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.
Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage.
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.
He also thinks he understand why we want same-sex marriage. Raising the most-gays-are-gay-because-they-were-molested canard, he writes:
The dark secret of homosexual society — the one that dares not speak its name — is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
It’s that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual “marriage.”
So this is just a small glimpse into the psyche of NOM’s newest board member. Maybe that explains the “Gathering Storm” ad. Scott may well have provided the script. Meanwhile, the parodies keep on coming:
Sci-Fi Writer Advocates Overthrow of Government If Prop 8 Fails
Jim Burroway
August 1st, 2008
Do you think shootings in Knoxville are a one-time thing? Science fiction author Orson Scott Card wants to take it up several notches if California’s Proposition 8 fails.
In an astonishingly paranoid and incoherent op-ed appearing in the July 24 Mormon Times, Card zig-zags from one point to the next, somehow drawing in property rights, the color of grey and the properties of asphalt before he’s finally is able to get around to his point, which apparently is this:
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.
Card is a very well-regarded science fiction writer. His novel Ender’s Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead both won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, making Card the first author to win both of science fiction’s top prizes in two consecutive years. This makes this rambling screed all the more remarkable. It’s not only abysmally constructed logic, but it’s horribly written.
But at least he’s consistent. His manifesto from 2004 was much longer and even more rambling. And that one is a mere reflection of what he wrote in 1990:
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.
Since I’m not much of a science fiction fan, I’ve never read his books. I don’t know what kind of world he conjures in his works of fiction. All I know is that what he’s trying to conjure in the real world is far darker than anything I’ve seen in quite a while.
[Hat tips: Nick Literski and Jody Wheeler]
COMMENTS (51) | LINK
