meganbmoore | Oh, so this is what they meant...

Oh, so this is what they meant...

So, about a month ago,

smillaraaq told me about Orson Scott Card and his views on same sex marriage. At the time, I mostly noticed that he said a homosexual man who wanted to get married could simply marry a woman and have everything he wanted. I politely refrained from mentioning how he was excluding homosexual women from the equation, and consigning a woman to a marriage that would, at best, be peaceful coexistence, but most likely be unhappy and even bitter, and passed it off as "not getting it."

Then

matociquala linked to an article on the subject earlier, that, uhm...ok, as near as I can tell, he's saying he will personally attempt to overthrow the government if homosexual marriages are allowed.

Anyway...

Uhm...wow? I can't count the ways I'm offended that have nothing whatsoever to the subjects of homosexuality or homosexual marriages. Actually, as near as I can tell, he has no problems with homosexuality itself (not about to go investigating, you can correct me if I've parsed it wrong in my dazed boggling) just with homosexual marriages. For men, at least. I don't think women have any sexual or romantic feelings in his world save for when their husbands tell them to.

Here, a few excerpts that make me inclined to rant, some for reasons not even connected to the main subject(well, mostly):

Not only that, but the courts upheld obviously unconstitutional limitations on free speech and public assembly: It is now illegal even to kneel and pray in front of a clinic that performs abortions.

Do not suppose for a moment that the "gay marriage" diktats will not be supported by methods just as undemocratic, unconstitutional and intolerant.

You know what? I'm Christian, and I strongly approve of not allowing that, for reasons not connected to abortion itself(I'm not touching that subject, pro or con, at all.) Why? Because of this: shaming, guilting and frightening someone into sharing your beliefs accomplishes nothing. A person who makes a choice for that reason will never be happy or comfortable with it, and the decision will only last as long as the negative feelings connected with the opposite decision to. If you want to influence a person, you have to approach them as an equal. Respect them and the fact that they have an opinion or belief, even if you can't respect the opinion or belief itself. If you feel strongly enough about something to argue a point or confront someone with it, be prepared to go at it point by point and listen to what they have to say, then make your counterpoint. An attack that allows no equality, defense, or common ground accomplishes nothing.

Here's the irony: There is no branch of government with the authority to redefine marriage. Marriage is older than government. Its meaning is universal: It is the permanent or semipermanent bond between a man and a woman, establishing responsibilities between the couple and any children that ensue.

The laws concerning marriage did not create marriage, they merely attempted to solve problems in such areas as inheritance, property, paternity, divorce, adoption and so on.

Uhm. Yeah. You know, I'm pretty sure marriage as almost anyone defines it exists to legitimize status and legal rights. Which typically requires a governing body dictating what that constitutes, and creating laws to uphold it. Marriage is the legalization of the relationship, not the relationship itself.

There is no natural method by which two males or two females can create offspring in which both partners contribute genetically. This is not subject to legislation, let alone fashionable opinion.

One word: Adoption. Think of the homeless kids. Also...uhm...not everyone wants kids. Forcing people who don't want a kid to have them will just make everyone-including the kid-miserable.

Married people are doing something that is very, very hard -- to combine the lives of a male and female, with all their physical and personality differences, into a stable relationship that persists across time.
...
Husbands need to have the whole society agree that when they marry, their wives are off limits to all other males. He has a right to trust that all his wife's children would be his.

Wives need to have the whole society agree that when they marry, their husband is off limits to all other females. All of his protection and earning power will be devoted to her and her children, and will not be divided with other women and their children.
...
Men routinely discard wives and children to follow the nearly universal male biological desire for diversity in mating. Adultery is now openly expected of men, even if faithful wives deplore it.

Translation of all this: "Marriage between a man and a woman is beautiful and pure and perfect and equal...but the woman can't complain if he cheats all the time or dumps her and their kids for someone else, because that's natural and right for men."

We need the same public protection of marriage that we have of property. If we did not all agree that people continue to own things that are not in their immediate possession, then you could not reasonably expect to come home and find your house unoccupied.

We agree, by law, to make it a crime to take what belongs to others -- even when you need it more than they do. Every aspect of our lives is affected by this, and not for a moment could a society exist that did not protect the right of property.

If property rights were utterly abolished, and you could own nothing, you would leave that society as quickly as possible -- or create a new society that agreed to respect each other's property rights and protected them from outsiders who would attempt to take away your property.

Marriage is, if anything, more vital, more central, than property.

Right then, people are personal property?

A vast number of unmarried men and women have such contempt for marriage that they share bed and home without asking for any formal recognition by society.

So...that's bad for heterosexuals, but homosexuals can do that or marry someone they don't love?

Dear JKR: You know how part of why I can never make myself care enough to read your books is that article I read where you said you didn't know you were writing fantasy until after the first Harry Potter book was out and someone told you it was fantasy? (And a few other articles that simply made me doubt you could possibly have written the books on your own.) Well, my opinion on that matter hasn't really changed, but in comparison, I now consider you to be a genius.

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By 1000 AD, these views were seen as old-fashioned.

He sounds like a man who is gay, but in denial. A lot of them are the most homophobic people around and it's clear he has no feelings towards women except a fear that, if they are not controlled, they may be dangerous.

Whatever his own leanings, everything he says screams sexual and social inadequate.

I looked at one of his books once, but the first paragraph failed to grip me, so I didn't read it. I'm so glad now that I didn't.

I'm rather old-fashioned myself. I consider marriage to be between a man and a woman, but support the rights of gays and lesbians to have civil partnerships, joinings or whatever else they want to call them. John Barrowman chooses not to call his relationship a marriage because he agrees that marriage is a male/female thing.

My chief concern regarding homosexual marriage is the social and legal legitimization and equality of the relationship and rights that go with it.

I've been told I should read some of his books, but don't think I ever could at this point. I have to say, though, that I actually got a sexist feel from the article as a whole stronger than I did a homophobic feel. Which isn't to say I didn't get that too.

That's how it seems to me too. He clearly has deep problems in relating to women as people.

Absolutely, homosexual relationships should have legitimacy and rights. What annoys me is that the people who oppose it are the same ones who say gays are promiscuous and never make commitments. It's hypocritical to then deny them the right to make a legally binding commitment.

I have to say, though, that I actually got a sexist feel from the article as a whole stronger than I did a homophobic feel.

I do think that there's a strong element of 'Marriage is a tool for controlling women, and if it doesn't serve the purpose of binding women to men, it's worthless at best and dangerous at worst' to a lot of anti-gay-marriage rhetoric, and I would not be surprised to catch a strong whiff of it from Card.

I used to love his books, but his female characters were often the tamers and gentlers of men, but easily led astray by bad men, who needed a strong male hand to keep them in line. Ick.

I think he believes the female sex drive is a myth. And the female brain.

"He sounds like a man who is gay, but in denial."

This is what I've been strongly suspecting for a while. I read Ender's Game before I knew he was, ah, an asshole, and I thought it was a beautiful book laced with an odd, subtle, but noticeable undercurrent of homoeroticism. Then I found out he was a bigot and I was like, "..." THEN I found out his first books had been full of overt homoeroticism and I started really wondering...

I was at school with someone like that. He went on and on about how much he hated gays and then, in his final year, became very involved with another boy and changed overnight for the better.

Then matociquala linked to an article on the subject earlier, that, uhm...ok, as near as I can tell, he's saying he will personally attempt to overthrow the government if homosexual marriages are allowed.

I really, really hope he does! That would be good for a laugh, OSC against the whole of America, all by himself. Maybe we could arrange a line of women to laugh at him as he makes his way to the Pentagon.

Yeah. That's the amazing part.

I'm pretty sure he expects everyone to join him. Especially the women, as they have no identity outside of being a man's wife. Can't risk losing that.

Yes, we all live in dread of the institution of male ownership collapsing, don't we? :D

Ooh! Ooh! I'll join that line in a heartbeat!

There is no natural method by which two males or two females can create offspring in which both partners contribute genetically.
D'oh, really? And here I thought mpreg applied to RL as well! Silly me.

This man...ugh! I have a gay friend, and it really makes me mad when idiots like this guy go and denounce gays/gay marriage whilst conforming to the belief that relationships are defined by the law and that the man is supposed to be responsible for the income. I did a report on Betty Friedan, and...wow. She would not approve. This man must not be living in the same time period as us.

I very, very sincerely hope that any Mrs. Card dumped him years and years ago.

They're still married, and the youngest of their five children still lives at home -- I believe she's high-school age.

From what little I've seen, Card professes your basic sort of "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude, and claims to have had gay friends that he likes and respects as people, although he views their lifestyle as intrinsically sinful. He seems to be pretty much in line with the current official LDS stance on homosexuality (http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_lds.htm) -- homosexual activity is deeply sinful in and of itself, even in the context of a committed relationship; people with same-sex feelings/orientation should remain celibate, and struggle to overcome these feelings via repentance and reparation therapy.

(Let us not delve into the irony of his talk about exclusivity in marriage, given his church's colorful history of polygyny (http://www.religioustolerance.org/lds_poly.htm)! No, that wouldn't be fair, since he's apparently following the current mainline theologians, and the LDS mainline gave up on the whole plural marriage thing back in 1890. Instead, I shall point and laugh at his rants about how the government, under the influence of the environmentalist cult, is taking his precious incandescent lightbulbs away.)

And all of my slashy icons are just too damn subtexty-subtle to use here, so I'll go with chibi-Gono's best moon-over-my-hammy pose instead.

I think this is the closest I have to a slashy icon. And it isn't unless you just ignore the "not impressed" expressions and just look at the positioning.

I'm pretty sure he approves of polygyny. As long as it's just the males getting it from more than one person.

did you see John Scalzi's reaction to that?
http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=1181

And a Law Professor Bainbridge's interpretation of both stances?
http://www.stephenbainbridge.com/punditry/comments/scalzi_v_card_on_the_end_of_democracy/

I just lost any respect I had for the man. I've never read his books, but since they're normally pushed forward as the Greatest Thing Ever I could at least give him praise for that. Now I'll just ignore him.

I'm more saddened by the thought that if he did try to take over the US because of such issues he wouldn't be alone.

We're in the same boat.

I don't think he has much connection with reality.

The sad part is that Orson Scott Card is an immensely talented and creative writer and apparently a really nice guy. He just has SO. MANY. ISSUES.

Homophobic AND sexist, gee what a catch. He needs to do his research before he pours more idiocy into this world. For example, well known studies show women cheat more than men.

Um. If someone showed up to protest my wedding without reason (say, a Jane Eyre thing where they wanted to point out my husband-to-be was already married)-- no matter the gender of my partner -- I'd be pretty pissed off.

Marriage -- as I see it -- at its heart, is just about two people who love each other dearly. Polygamy I'm a bit iffy on (mostly due to hearing about some bad examples), but it's supported by the bible, so that's another kettle of fish entirely.

Oh, and your complaint about JKR -- at least she's better than Margaret Atwood, who wrote a science fiction novel and made numerous statements saying it wasn't science fiction.

I think that was more a marketing choice than snobbishness about genre.

JKR is kind of why I don't read many articles by or about authors whose stuff I'm thinking about checking out. I could never tell if she just wasn't smart enough to realize there were several blatant pop fiction sources chunks of her work seemed to be lifted from (all the way to her lead being a physical copy-including, I think, the scar-of a Neil Gaiman character) and what genre she was writing and using every imaginable trope of, or if she just didn't respect the genre.

OSC is so bizarre, and whenever he goes off on homophobic rants, I keep wondering why he seems so fascinated and personally offended by homosexuality. A main character in one of his earlier novels, which I really do recommend, ends up sleeping with a man when he has sex for the first time--of course, this becomes the turning point that destroys him, but nonetheless, there's a lot of homoeroticism in Card's books that he stridently denies.

nonetheless, there's a lot of homoeroticism in Card's books that he stridently denies.

Hence, all the snarky comments about OSC being a closet homosexual.

I like quite a few of Orson Scott Card's books and think he is a very talented writer, but I decided to ignore his personal opinions and politics several years ago, because they are so very different from mine. I can still enjoy some of his books without being reminded how much of a bigot he is in person.

I support same-sex marriage / registered relationships, and I think it's a good thing that they are legal in Finland.

Card is, like, Exhibit A for why I don't like knowing much personal information about the authors I like to read. I used to be a big fan of his, but his past eruptions of public homophobia (and as you point out, the attendant sexism) irreversibly colored how I perceive his work, and I haven't had any interest in reading anything he writes since.

There is no branch of government with the authority to redefine marriage. Marriage is older than government.

Well then, I expect to hear OSC call for the repeal of Loving v. Virginia, since that was clearly out of the government's jurisdiction.

Its meaning is universal: It is the permanent or semipermanent bond between a man and a woman, establishing responsibilities between the couple and any children that ensue.

That noise you hear is my inner anthropologist screaming in the corner. An afternoon with any halfway decent study of marriage would show that this isn't true.

And just think, these were excerpts.

The full thing is even better.

Yeah, I only got through the first four paragraphs before I had to click the back button.

I sometimes attempt to read his screeds and wonder how the man ever put a coherent sentence together to begin with. He and Dave Sim are in the same conservative groupthink talent-sucking hell, I suspect. Pity they'll never realize.

I actually thought about a second post saying "I do not know what these sentences mean. Please translate them for me."

Not sure I've read anything Sims has said.

He was a brilliant and interesting writer, and then he decided women were horrible parasites that sucked the life from men, and then he found Islam, which seemed to make things worse.

Oh, oh, the crazy is even deeper than that! See, he thinks Islam and Judaism and Christianity all have good points, and he accepts all their holy books as valid Words of God in general, but at the same time he thinks that none of them in isolation quite give the whole picture. So his religion is his own personal Abrahamic monotheistic blend of all three.

You also need to see the bits where in the gospel according to Sim, women are not just light-sucking voids, but intrinsically irrational beings ruled by emotion and incapable of rational male-style thought. This is why, like children, they have well-padded buttocks, the better to spank them into proper behavior. (And men who disagree with him, well, their problem is that they've been brainwashed since birth by the "feminist/homosexualist axis" that controls modern Western society and is the root of all that's wrong with the world today.)

Trust me, I've read a fair bit of Card's blog postings and a lot of the recurring Sim wank, and they're on totally different levels. Card's logic doesn't always make sense, but the basic moral and political philosophies he's espousing are pretty much on par with other folks of similarly conservative religious and political bent; his theology in particular seems to be pretty much in line with official LDS positions. While he's obviously out of step with folks of differing religious or political bents, he's not really coming up with these ideas out of a vacuum, there are folks who'd be in full agreement with him. Sim...he's just on another planet. He had a nervous breakdown in 1979 and has said in print that at the time, he was diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic. And it sounds like he never really got any help with his mental illness (he goes on to sneer at his mother and then-wife "getting scared" about the diagnosis and wanting to push him to seek medical help, "the court of first resort for most emotion-based beings"), but he rejects the whole idea of schizophrenia as being just another manifestation of the "fundamental, primary, seminal schism between emotion-based feminine reality and reason-based masculine reality". No, really. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. Card may have Issues, but Sim I fear has gone far beyond Issues into flat-out clinical Crazy.

(Yes, he's divorced now. Long since. And celibate for religious reasons. And he's so sick and tired of the feminist/homosexualist critics who are incapable of reason that he now will not engage in any correspondence unless the other party opens their letter or email with a statement that they don't believe he is a misogynist. I could go on and on. It's real trainwreck stuff, almost too sad to be funny for the most part.)

...yeah. I lost track of the crazy around 96 and never really regretted it. I read more during the "Glamourpuss" wanks on Journalfen, but. Oh, Dave Sim. You so crazy.

Yeah, much the same here -- I loved the first couple of phonebooks when they first came but gave up on reading Cerebus after Church and State II, the art was getting better and better but the story was just going off on all these interminably dull tangents and the characters were starting to not feel like the ones I'd come to love anymore. So I missed the first really blatant signs of the crazy that showed up a few books later, and by the time I heard about it on the geek grapevine, he'd long since descended into full-on crazy mode. I still can't bring myself to try to read the later volumes -- so much wasted brilliance put to the service of such insanity just seems too depressing -- but for some strange trainwrecky reason I can't seem to resist reading the latest OH DAVE SIM NO wank whenever it crops up.

I actually started reading after The Comics Journal talked up "Jaka's Story," which was, pretty much, one long tangent. And things were pretty awesome for a bit. But then he started going crazier and crazier, and the letters sections started getting weeeeird, and...yeah.

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Oh, so this is what they meant...

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Since you discovered that article...

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