Oh, so this is what they meant...

[meganbmoore]

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.

Comments

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

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.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

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.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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.)

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

...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.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

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.