I wrote a while back about being scolded by defensive Christians whenever I post or re-blog something about someone claiming to be Christian spreading hatred and bigotry. In that post, I mentioned that sex advice columnist and gay rights advocate, Dan Savage, refers to those people as NALTs or NALT Christians because of the phrase “Not all like that.” And then he advises that rather than tell us gay people that not all Christians are like that, you ought to tell the other Christians.
Several of those people have taken Dan’s words to heart, and have launched The NALT Christians Project (notalllikethat.org). Which I think is a good idea.
One of the things I really like about this and the It Gets Better Project (itgetsbetter.org) is that both of them set out to fight bigotry and hatred not by attacking people for being bigots, but by simply voicing non-bigotry, acceptance, and love.
On Wednesday attorneys working for Pennsylvania, under instructions from the Governor of that state, Tom Corbett, filed a brief with the state supreme court asking the court to stop the one county official who is issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples.
As reported far and wide, the brief included this brilliant piece of legal intellectualism:
“”Had the clerk issued marriage licenses to 12-year-olds in violation of state law, would anyone seriously contend that each 12-year-old . . . is entitled to a hearing on the validity of his ‘license’?”
A lot of people have taken issue with that analogy, and on Friday the governor issued a statement that did not backpedal, but tried to explain and deflect:
… the analogy was being taken out of context through a campaign of misinformation by the governor’s detractors. The reference to 12-year-olds was only meant to illustrate one group that is prohibited from marrying under state law, he said. But it’s an analogy, the governor feels was inappropriate, Hagen-Frederiksen said. The governor never said it or wrote it, Hagen-Frederiksen said, but his detractors are acting like he did. So Corbett wants to clear his name and wants the public to know, he doesn’t agree with it and he thinks it was an inappropriate analogy, Hagen-Frederiksen said.
Now, Corbett has only been Governor for two years, however, before that he was elected to two terms as the state Attorney General, had previously been a U.S. Attorney for many years, had served as acting state Attorney General for half a term, and spent many years before that as an assistant district attorney. One would think with all of that experience, he would have some idea how official statements about legal matters are drafted and sent to the courts, and how responsibility for what is said in them works.
But since he doesn’t seem to understand that, let me explain: Gov. Corbett, you instructed the state attorneys to file a brief, and you authorized them to file the brief on your behalf. So all of those news stories that say your administration filed it are absolutely correct. Further, even the headlines that elide over things are still accurate, because you authorized them to file the brief. It doesn’t matter whether you actually read it or not, you authorized it.
More specifically, you authorized lawyers to file a brief with the court on your behalf. As a long-time member of the legal profession, Governor, you ought to know that lawyers don’t speak to the court for themselves, they speak for their clients. As far as the legal system is concerned, you made that statement.
Your spokesperson has indicated (and emphasized by mentioning, twice, that you are away on vacation) that you hadn’t read the brief before it was submitted. If we are to believe that you didn’t read this brief which you authorized before it was submitted—a brief about what has become the civil rights issue of the decade and which is the subject of multiple political battles happening in your state right now—that calls into question your judgement, both legal and political.
The governor’s statement didn’t retract the brief. In fact, he said the logic behind the controversial statement is sound, just that the analogy is inappropriate. I could digress for some time about how argument by analogy is part of logic, but I won’t. The governor is standing by his statement arguing against marriage rights for gays and lesbians, and saying that he thinks it’s unfair that people thinks that proves he is biased.
I don’t know the governor, so I don’t know whether to believe him about not reading the brief beforehand. I strongly suspect that he at least read drafts of the brief before the final was filed. But if he didn’t, I suspect the reason he didn’t pay close attention is because he doesn’t think the matter is important. He doesn’t think the matter is important because he doesn’t think gay people (and non-gays who care about the rights of gay people) are important.
Thinking that any group’s civil rights are unimportant is a pretty strong indicator of bias, even without an “inappropriate analogy.”
The evangelist designed this cover of his ebook himself! (Click to embiggen)This fun little story, I believe first reported by the Friendly Atheist, started making the rounds yesterday. A conservative Christian preacher released an ebook entitled Bible Principles of Child Discipline, used a photograph from the ABC situation comedy “Modern Family” on his book cover.
Modern Family is pretty much universally reviled in those so-called Christian circles where this sort of “beat the devil out of your child” book is likely to sell. A big reason is because, within the show, one of the uncles of those three children in the photo the preacher chose for his book is gay, and lives with his same-sex partner, with whom he has adopted a child. There are several other reasons those folks hate the show, but that’s the biggee.
Evangelist Doug Sehorne (who describes himself on his own web page as “an Old Fashioned Bible Preacher”) was outraged when people started telling him he’d put a picture from that wicked show on his book. So, he took to his Facebook page to defend himself:
“FALSELY ACCUSED! Well, I just got a phone call about the picture I used on my Book on Child Discipline. Evidently, it is from a wicked TV show involving a gay couple! Here is the situation. 1) I do not even have a TV and have not for 35 years. 2) I never heard of the TV Show. 3) I got the image from a search on Google Images, which I assumed were not copyrighted, etc. 4) Anyone who knows me, knows I would never condone such wickedness as sodomy or even TV. Your friends will warn you and your enemies will attack without knowing all the facts. I am in the process now of removing the book and changing the cover.”
Everyone else who is sharing this story seems to just be focusing on the hilarity of a super anti-gay preacher putting a photo from one of the most famously gay television series on his book. And it is more than mildly amusing, but I have other concerns:
Old-fashioned Bible Preacher says he’s falsely accused! (Click to embiggen)
First, Mr Evangelist, it isn’t a false accusation. You did put a picture which had been intended to promote this show you believe is wicked on the cover of your book because you thought the image depicts an ideal family. That’s a fact.
It is a principle of both the law and the sort of fundie bible-thumping you practice that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Just as in your world view god condemns people who never heard of your religion by sending them to hell for not following it, not knowing the source and intended meaning of the image you chose doesn’t absolve you of culpability for whatever sinful things you seem to think your co-religionists have accused you of.
If TV is so very wicked that you haven’t owned one in 35 years and would never watch any, what the heck are you doing on the internet? Because television is extremely tame compared to the content you can stumble onto on the net!
Given the lengths to which everyone from the so-called Concerned Women for America, the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera has gone to condemning this show and holding it up as an example of the satanic destruction of America for four years now, I have a very hard time believing you’ve never heard of it. And if you really haven’t heard all of your co-religionist having the vapors over it, you need to actually pay attention to your own people a bit more.
You found it through Google images (you didn’t find it “on” Google images, but we’ll let that little distinction slide) which you assume means it is free of copyright? You are wrong, wrong, wrong. That means you are both stupid and in violation of copyright law, as your unlicensed use of the image as a means to sell your book isn’t fair use (all of us sharing the image of your use of the image and reporting on your mistake is covered by fair use, by the way). If you are going to publish something and sell it, you cannot assume, you need to do research. If you are going to use an image for commercial purposes you cannot assume, you must confirm. Even if what you’re doing isn’t commercial, when you pick an image to illustrate a point, you should at least make an effort to determine where the image came from.
On that previous bullet, I refer you again to the principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Claiming your friends will vouch for you isn’t a defense before either the law of man or your version of the law of god any more than ignorance is.
Your stupid and illegal choice of the photo isn’t even the worst sin committed on that cover. Your font choice is awful. And if your book must have a subtitle (which are way, way, way overused in any case) the subtitle is supposed to be longer than the title. Also, everyone knows that if you use punctuation to set off the subtitle it’s supposed to be a colon, not parenthesis. And finally, a title should be at least somewhat engaging. That isn’t a title, that’s a boring literal description. I could go on further about your color and layout choices…
Evangelist Doug Sehorne? I was not aware of any church that uses the word evangelist as a formal title. It’s usually Reverend, though I know in the ultra-fundie circles you move in, there is a resistance to reverend because it is considered prideful to think of yourself as revered, but I don’t see how giving yourself a title of Evangelist and putting it at the front of your name and using it in the same manner people refer to governors and presidents is any less prideful.
I can’t get away from that horrid font. My god! Look at the awful kerning between the capital P and lower-case r! Then the opposite kind of horrid kerning between the c-i-p combo in the same word! Using that font for a book title in that way is truly a crime against everything right, good, and beautiful in this world. And if your god doesn’t condemn you to the lowest pit of hell for that alone, he isn’t worth believing in!
I hate being wrong, but I try to own up to it when I find out.
When I wrote a few days ago about the leader of an ex-gay group who was saying ex-gays deserve federal protections just like the ones gays get, I said that there aren’t any federal protections explicitly for gays. That was really a minor part of my argument, but a number of people took issue with it.
When the spokesman was asked to explain what kind of discrimination ex-gays experience, he said that they’re intimidated, threatened, called liars, and that the media doesn’t take them seriously. Now, threats and intimidation can be serious, depending on what form they take. That’s why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 called out acts of interference and intimidation by force when it is motivated by a person’s actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin. It only covered such acts of force in specific areas: attending school, patronizing a public place, applying for work, serving on a jury, or voting.
But being called a liar? Not usually considered a crime. Particularly when it has been proven many times that you have lied. And not being taken seriously by the media? Excuse me? Since when is the federal government ordering the media to take gays seriously?
In 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act added gender to the list of motivations that could be considered a hate crime, and directed a sentencing commission to provide guidelines for increased sentencing of those acts.
Several attempts were made over the years to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list, and those all failed.
Until 2010, when a rider was attached to the National Defense Authorization Act. Thanks to this rider, federal hate crimes laws do cover crimes where the motivation of the criminal is the perceived or actual sexual orientation and gender identity of the victim. The law also removed the requirement that the crime had to be committed when the person was attempting to vote or attend school and so on. It still has to be a crime of force or actual injury, though.
Somehow I had the recollection that the attempt to add this had been blocked in one of the houses of congress. But I had completely misremembered. Thus, I was wrong in my original posting.
So, federal hate crime laws do now include crimes committed because of one’s sexual orientation (or someone’s perception thereof—so people like the guys who beat and killed a pair of straight brothers because they thought the men were a gay couple would still qualify as a hate crime; the attackers thought the men were gay and the entire reason they attacked the men was because of that perception).
However, I must point out that even this act doesn’t protect specifically gay people. Besides the example I gave, of someone attacking a straight person because they mistake them for a gay person and they think gay people should be beaten or killed, it applies the other way, too. In other words, the law doesn’t say “perceived or actual homosexuality” it’s any sexual orientation, including straight.
And if the ex-gays are correct, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that they have somehow changed their orientation, then they are simply straight people, and if anyone is intimidating them through force or injuring them because of their no-longer-gay orientation, they are covered.
If I, and every medical and psychological association that has studied the issue, are correct, and they’re just gay people who are pretending to be cured so they can keep making money selling their fake cure to desperate and frightened people, well, if anyone is intimidating them through force or injuring them because of their not-really-ex-gay orientation, they’re still covered.
If someone is intimidating Mr Doyle or his fellow ex-gays through force (or threat of force) or are injuring them, those people are wrong and should be held accountable to the full extent of the law.
But having people like me point and laugh at them, that isn’t intimidation through force, it isn’t a threat, and it isn’t a crime. When specialized news blogs, such as Good As You, Truth Wins Out, Americablog, or Wonkette point out their lies, inconsistencies, and ridiculous claims, that isn’t a crime. When news organizations report on studies that show their therapy causes more harm than good, that isn’t a crime. When not even Fox News can be bothered to cover their rally denouncing gay rights groups, that isn’t a crime.
Maybe I’m mean when I call them parasites and liars, but the facts back me up. It might sound less harsh to say that they are disingenuously taking advantage of desperate and vulnerable people, but the meaning is the same. So I’m going to stick to “lying parasites.”
One of my math professors began one of our classes with a lament about the loss of the word “discriminate.” She didn’t have a problem with any of the various movements to stop discrimination, of course. Having been a woman pursuing a career in science from the 1940s on, she had experienced her fair share of gender-based discrimination.
Discrimination ultimately means to perceive or distinguish the differences between things. “It’s unfair discrimination that’s the problem,” she said. “Someone’s race or gender has no bearing on how qualified someone is for a particular job. It’s perfectly legitimate to fire someone for incompetence, or for stealing on the job. In those cases you’re distinguishing between good employees and bad.”
While dictionaries still list the “distinguish between” definitions, in most modern discourse, people almost always use it to mean “an unjust or prejudicial distinction.”
When the largest ex-gay organization out there, Exodus International, disbanded recently, several of the smaller groups went into a bit of a panic. The spokesman for on the International Healing Foundation, Christopher Doyle, was right at the forefront. And then he announced that his organization, in concert with groups like the Family Research Council, was going to sponsor Ex-gay Pride in July, as a “balance” against Gay Pride. He even announced a banquet and reception at FRC’s headquarters, and so forth.
Except none of the more generic anti-gay groups he named would confirm they were attending the banquet. FRC wouldn’t even confirm that such an event was happening in their building! Next thing you know, they announced that they were re-scheduling it, claiming that they’re received death threats. Except, of course, they wouldn’t provide proof of the threats, nor could any news organization get any spokesperson from the other groups to confirm that they have planned to participate.
Doyle won’t be deterred, though. In radio interviews he repeated the charge of threats and talked a lot about how oppressed and discriminated ex-gays are.
“We want federal protection just as gays are given. Ex-gays also need to be given protection.” —Christopher Doyle, International Healing Foundation
There are several problems with that. First, at the time of this writing, gay people aren’t explicitly given much in the way of federal protections. The two big Supreme Court rulings that all the anti-gay organizations point to in this regard don’t extend anti-discrimination protection to people based on sexual orientation.
Lawrence v. Texas: struck down sodomy laws in 2003. The Court held that intimate consensual sexual conduct between adults was part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling invalidated sodomy laws regardless of the gender. Most of the sodomy laws in question in theory could have been applied to opposite sex partners (remember that the original definition of sodomy is any sexual act that can’t result in pregnancy, it doesn’t just refer to anal sex between men, contrary to popular belief), though in practice they were almost never used against straight couples.
United States v. Windsor: struck down section three of the Defense of Marriage Act. The court ruled that if a state recognizes a marriage, then the federal government must also recognize the marriage. The ruling skirted around the issue of defining exactly what level of scrutiny should apply to cases of applying rights based on sexual orientation, though it implied a level greater than the lowest level, rational basis.
Neither ruling created any federal protection against discrimination. In fact, the second ruling was written in such a way as to completely sidestep the question of whether gay rights rise to the level of a constitutional right requiring strict judicial scrutiny.
Even their decision that effectively restored marriage equality in California didn’t create any federal protection. The ruling was specifically that the anti-gay groups didn’t have standing to appeal a lower court ruling.
The second problem with Doyle’s plea is what do they need protection from? As several people have pointed out, if what they say about their therapy is true, than an ex-gay is merely a straight person. So who is discriminating against them? No one is beating them or shooting them for holding hands in public with an opposite-sex person. No one is prohibiting them from marrying an opposite-sex person. No one is denying them any legal rights at all.
When confronted with these arguments, Doyle says that ex-gays are harassed by gay people. “There are tens of thousands of ex-gays out there, but they are afraid to go public because they are harassed, and threatened, and called liars.”
Here’s the thing. Every time that an ex-gay therapist or organization has been put under oath in a court of law, they have had to admit that they don’t cure gay people. Ever. For a while they claimed a 15% success rate (which seems dismal by any standard), until they had to defend the methodology in a court of law, at which point it was learned that the one study they pointed to was of 73 patients who enrolled in the same year with one ex-gay organization. They only got the 15% rate by excluding 98 other enrollees who dropped out before completing therapy, and by defining success as “the person reports that they feel their same-sex attraction is less than it used to be.”
More recently, they admitted their success rate was less than 0.1 percent. That means that 99.9% of people who try therapy, or pray-away-the-gay programs, et cetera, are unable to change from being gay. And even then, success is defined as refraining from same-sex sexual activity, not actually ceasing to be attracted to members of the same sex.
One of the former leaders of a couple of these groups published a book chronicling a couple of case studies of young men he treated from adolescence into adulthood. The book concluded by declaring great victory in one case, naming the boy as proof that god and therapy could cure homosexuality. The problem was that the young man in question had committed suicide, six years before the doctor published the book. The young man’s suicide note indicated that all the years of therapy (including aversion therapy, drugs to deaden his libido, et cetera) and praying hadn’t changed how he felt. And he would rather die than face rejection from his family.
Hardly a success.
Just google ex-gay and see how many news stories pop up of “famous” ex-gays who have been caught trying to hook up for sex in gay bars, or using hook-up apps, or hiring young male prostitutes to accompany them on overseas lecture tours. You’ll also find stories of once prominent ex-gays having quietly left the movement and taken up with a same-sex partner.
Even a superficial attempt to research this topic will make it clear that the only living ex-gay they can name are people who now make their living entirely by peddling ex-gay therapy or working for things like anti-gay political action committees.
When you make your living selling a therapy that has been proven not to work, when you prey upon people who fear rejection from their families and communities by promising a cure that has been proven not to work, when you sell people $300+ “introductory kits” and charge them exorbitant fees for therapy sessions that have been proven not to work, you are lying.
That makes you a liar.
Pointing out the fact that you are a liar when it has been demonstrated again and again and again that you are lying is not subjecting you to unjust or prejudicial discrimination. It’s an accurate description.
If we go further and point to people like that one young man who committed suicide (and there are far, far more than just him) as a result of your failed therapy, that isn’t unjust or prejudicial, either. That’s called holding you accountable.
After canceling Ex-gay Pride, Doyle announced an Ex-gay Rights Rally in Washington, D.C. He did the arch-conservative radio circuit confidently predicting that thousands of ex-gays would show up to demand their rights.
Speakers at the big Ex-gay Rights Rally earlier this week. (Click to embiggen)They came up a little short.
And to be clear, this isn’t a picture taken from in front of an enormous crowd of the oppressed masses of ex-gay people. There was no crowd. At all.
Afterwards, Doyle admitted that only nine ex-gays attended, but he declared it a success, because those nine people overcame great fear of discrimination to bravely show their faces. He failed to mention that he was including himself and eight other employees of ex-gay ministries in that count.
They didn’t just outnumber the crowd, there was no crowd. (Click to embiggen)In the second picture I’ve included, everyone you see in that wide shot is an employee of one of the ex-gay groups, or someone there covering the “news” event. And please note, the camera crew was hired by one of the ex-gay groups hosting the event. Even Fox News couldn’t bother to send a camera man, they later ran the video shot by the organizers. The Wonkette news blog went so far as to issue an apology for its earlier story about the announcement which had predicted “maybe tens or even dozens” of attendees.
Just as accurately being described isn’t discrimination, trying to appear relevant so donations will keep coming in isn’t fighting discrimination.
All sorts of news sites and blogs and individuals have been spreading the “news” far and wide that Pope Francis said, “Who am I to judge gay people?” As if this represents a significant softening of the church’s anti-gay stance.
There are three problems with that: one, that sentence isn’t quite what he said even as a out-of-context quote; two, once you put what he did say in context, it’s pretty much the exact opposite of what everyone is reporting he said; and three, it isn’t an actual change at all.
First, what did he actually say? “If someone is gay, who searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?”
It might seem like a subtle difference, but there are two qualifiers in the sentence which can be unpacked in a variety of ways. What constitutes searching for the Lord, for instance? If he means striving to adhere to current church teachings that homosexuality is disordered and sinful, then that right there means that the kindest spin you could put on what he said is, “Who am I to judge ex-gays?”
Second, what was the context? The pope was responding questions from reporters about a person who was recently hired to sort out problems at the Vatican Bank, but there are allegations the person was involved in a gay relationship a decade ago. And while repeating that homosexuality is a sin but gays shouldn’t be marginalized, he made the above comment, and then went on to chastise the reporters from bringing up someone’s past sins that are behind them. Once again, the kindest way one can interpret the statement in context is either “Who am I to judge ex-gays?” or “Who am I to judge people who are discreet?”
Third, it has always been the case that the church overlooks the past sins of its own people in leadership positions, so long as they make a token statement that they won’t do it again. That’s why there are all those thousands of pedophile priest scandals out there, for goodness sake! And it has always been the case that the church overlooks homosexuality among its own clergy so long as they deny it or pretend to hide it (Pope Benedict XVI, for instance).
In full context, keeping in mind that he began the answer with a sort of bizarre observation that no one has ever handed him their business card with the business card proclaiming the person to be gay, the statement isn’t even really about either sexual orientation or sexual activity. It is about whether a person is closeted. It’s the same song-and-dance haters always retreat to when confronted about either their bigotry or a seeming double-standard: I don’t care what someone does in private, why do they have to flaunt it?
Even the section of the answer where he mentions the church teaching that calls for homosexuals to be treated with dignity and not marginalized doesn’t earn him any tolerance points. That line has been repeated whenever the church unloads a new condemnation of gay people, gay rights, and so on. It was even mentioned by that Bishop last year in his statement about a bunch of pedophile priests whose crimes the church (under his watch) had covered up when the Bishop blamed all those crimes on the homosexual nature of the children whom the priests abused.
So, no, I don’t think this qualifies as a softening of tone. And it certainly doesn’t signal any new kind of tolerance. And it most certainly doesn’t count as a baby step.
What would count as a baby step? Here’s one, and it really wouldn’t be that difficult. I wish that this pope would take a page from an American priest who spoke up last year at a county commission meeting where the public was weighing in on a proposed gay rights ordinance. The priest said that the church’s teaching on the matter should not be taken into account on an ordinance. “We do not have authority over people outside our own flock,” he said. A baby step would be for this pope to say the church would stop weighing in on such matters of civil law. That the church would stop trying to prevent governments from decriminalizing gay activities. That the church would stop trying to get laws passed banning gay people from adopting. That the church would stop trying to keep the law from recognizing marriages between same sex couples.
The church doesn’t have to approve any of those things in order to stop trying to blackmail lawmakers into enforcing its disapproval by means of the law. The church doesn’t approve of divorce, but it long ago stopped trying to pressure governments into outlawing it. The church doesn’t approve of divorced people remarrying, but it long ago stopped trying to pressure governments to outlaw such marriages. The church considers children born to remarried couples as illegitimate, but it doesn’t pressure governments to label children that way, nor to deny the children of a remarriage Social Security benefits if the remarried parent dies, for instance.
Seriously, when was the last time an Archbishop directed priests to deny communion to law makers who didn’t vote for laws to declare the children of remarried parents illegitimate?
Treating gay people and gay relationships the same way that it treats divorced people would be a baby step. It wouldn’t be approval. It wouldn’t be a change of theology. It would be a simple admission that the church doesn’t have the authority to enforce its doctrine on people who are outside of its flock.
Opening the Skies to Everyone “…I have long advocated that the best way to hook someone on astronomy is to get them outside, and get them to look up. People see the stars all the time, but they don’t see them…”
Time at your own pace You may be familiar with the web comic, xkcd. Months back they posted a single panel black and with image of two stick figures on a slope. Not caption, no word balloons. If you hovered your mouse over the image you saw the alt-text said “Wait for it.” It took a while for people to figure out, but it slowly changed. It is an animated story posting one frame an hour. The first link will take you to a page the has all 3000+ frames gathered together. You can press play and watch it go. It will pause automatically at the frames that have word balloons. Or you can use the controls on the right and go through at your own pace. It’s very cool, with an interesting story. And it hasn’t come to an end, yet!
I thought I had said all I would say about the Orson Scott Card stuff in “Abyss Gazing” and “The Abyss’ Game“, unfortunately some people who I would have hoped knew better have decided that any gay people who have chosen or are contemplating choosing to withhold our patronage from anything that will put money in the pocket of that hateful homophobe, simply don’t understand the situation properly.
Before Twitter, I used to collect interesting links to news and news-ish things that I read over the course of the week, and then post them in a list on my old LiveJournal on Fridays. I called it “Friday Links.”
When I left my old job and switched to contracting, I had less freedom regarding what I could do during my lunch break. So, I got out of the habit. And people drifted away from LiveJournal. A few of us diehards still poke around there, but most of the folks who used to regularly read me there have gone elsewhere.
Now, I use my iPad to read news during my lunch break, and it’s easy to just tap and send the links to Twitter. Which isn’t quite the same.
I miss doing it. A few people who used to regularly read the old blog have mentioned that they miss my Friday Links.
The Wizard of Ahhhhs: note that the song is entirely a cappella. Great retelling of the movie:
And if you need some cute in your life, check out this youtube from winter before last at the Seattle Aquarium of a mama sea otter, Aniak, and her pup, Sekiu, when Sekiu was only one day old:
A few months ago I wrote about my decades long struggle with a specific incident of separating the art from the artist. A writer some of whose work I had enjoyed back in the eighties, removed all doubt about the hints of his extreme homophobia in 1990 when he published a long essay explaining how he didn’t hate anyone, but homosexuals deserved death and worse punishments, which god would mete out upon them some day.
At the time of my earlier post, DC Comics was facing a boycott by comic book stores and fans for having hired Orson Scott Card to write a Superman series. That deal has since been indefinitely suspended. Now, as news of a boycott of the movie adaptation of Card’s most famous work has surfaced, Mr Card is pleading for tolerance, because it’s a policy decision that has now been settled, and it would be unfair for people to punish a book written before this topic was even a political issue.
Card is doing what several of the anti-gay organizations and politicians have been doing the last year, trying to claim that they simply have a disagreement on this one tiny area of policy, and that now they are being punished for holding this reasonable opinion. The truth is, that Card, the National Organization for Marriage (of which he is a board member), and all the others oppose all gay rights, as well as opposing the laws allowing adults (straight and gay) to make a whole slew of decisions about their own sexual and reproductive behavior.
Orson Scott Card is a hateful homophobe who has actively campaigned for (and given money to) efforts to criminalize such behaviors. And it’s something that he has been doing for a lot longer than he would like you to believe.
At the time he wrote Ender’s Game and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead, he stated multiple times that he believed his writing was god’s work. He believed in moral absolutes, he said. He thought any society that didn’t enforce his moral absolutes would collapse, and he wanted to write fiction that demonstrated those ideas. He wrote more than once disparaging the moral relativism of much of science fiction, particularly the original Star Wars movies and novels of Iain Banks.
In that 1990 essay I mentioned above, Card wrote:
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.
The 1990 essay was written as the culmination of years of defending comments he had made shortly after the publication of Speaker for the Dead to the effect that homosexuality is all about domination and control of others, so of course he had to include homosexual villains in his world, even though he thought homosexuality was a sin and that homosexuals who didn’t repent would deserve whatever bad things that happened to them. Or, as he put in in that essay:
True kindness is to be ever courteous and warm toward individuals, while confronting them always with our rejection of any argument justifying their self-gratification. That will earn us their love and gratitude in the day of their repentance, even if during the time they still embrace their sins they lash out at us as if we were their enemies.. And if it happens that they never repent, then in the day of their grief they cannot blame us for helping them deceive and destroy themselves. That is how we keep ourselves unspotted by the blood of this generation…
In 2003 Mr Card was really angry at the Supreme Court for saying that laws which criminalized private sexual behavior between consenting adults were unconstitutional, and among other things he wrote:
There is no such thing on this earth as a human society that does not closely regulate the sexual and reproductive behavior of its members, to one degree or another.
In 2004 Mr Card wrote in The Rhinoceros Times:
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were… In fact, it will do harm. Nowhere near as much harm as we have already done through divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing. But it’s another nail in the coffin.
In 2008 Mr Card wrote in an op-ed piece for the Mormon Times:
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.
In 2012, again writing for the Rhinoceros Times, he said:
Heterosexual pair-bonding has been at the heart of human evolution from the time we divided off from the chimps. Normalizing a dysfunction will only make ours into a society that corrodes any loyalty to it, as parents see that our laws and institutions now work against the reproductive success (not to mention happiness) of the next generation.
You can read a whole lot of this on his own site, because he reposts most of his essays. He has disavowed some of his previous positions, but he’s also demonstrated a remarkable ability to change his tune back and forth as seems appropriate. Back in 2004, for instance, in an interview he disavowed some of the lies about gay people he had previously spouted in his editorial writings, and said that he no longer supported reinstating sodomy laws. Then he turned right around and as a Board Member for NOM voted to use those same lies and tactics in campaign commercials against the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t tell, and the passage of civil unions and marriage equality laws. As recently as the 2012 election, he’s authorized the same arguments for restoring sodomy laws as part of those campaigns supposedly defending traditional marriage.
On his web site he appeals to democracy a lot, decrying most of the civil rights progress (not just gay rights — he opposes divorce, access to birth control, and thinks that unmarried woman who have babies should face substantial penalties from society) because he thinks it is largely imposed by the courts.
Which I find particularly hilarious since a deep loathing for the notion of allowing people to make their own choices is obvious in every piece of fiction Card wrote, especially Ender’s Game. If you don’t remember that theme, and feel an urge to tell me how I fail to appreciate the brilliance of his work, go back and read your old copy of Ender’s Game, paying especial attention to the story arc of Peter, who eventually becomes a “benevolent dictator.”
Then we can talk.
Orson Scott Card is a hypocrite and a bigot who has used distortions and outright lies to hurt innocent people. He has renounced those lies and distortions when it is politically convenient, and then gone right back to using them as soon as possible. Now, he’s just a sore loser who hopes to make some decent money in Hollywood. And how much would you like to bet that he’s going to keep pouring part of his money into groups like NOM, and go right back to spreading the lies and distortions?
It’s time to stop giving him a pass. It’s time to stop giving him money, no matter how indirectly.
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