Turns, in the comments section, into a minor meditation about “fatal” peanut allergies.
(Just a reminder: peanut allergies only kill something like 50 people a year — maybe — in the United States.)
That these people focus so intently on the “rights” of a tiny, vocal minority (gays, the peanut-allergic) is part of their “if it saves one life” micro-worldview.
Proportionality is not a strong left wing attribute.
Most amusing are those who condemn Card for saying (there aren’t any hyperlinks, and it is my understanding that the quote dates back to 1990) that if — I’m paraphrasing — gays got too uppity about their rights, he would try to “overthrow the government.” (UPDATE: that part was in 2008.)
I wonder how many of these people own a Sex Pistols album?
Or, er, Superman comics…
Oh, but that’s different.
Except when it isn’t.
Liberals approve of everything right up to the moment they no longer approve of it, and boy, you’d better be willing to drop fucking everything and get on board that very second or else.
I debated this issue this with a longtime friend who is gay and also has ties to the SF community. I asked him why — since some of Card’s statements are 25 years old — they are suddenly problematic.
Isn’t it interesting that he had fully formed, if arguably flaky, views on gay rights before some latter day gays had any themselves?
I didn’t get a great answer to that question, which admittedly, is kinda subtle and hard for me to put into words anyhow:
It’s like Rip van Winkle woke up, became tyrant for life, and declared that something we’d all be enjoying (or just ignoring) for decades was suddenly off limits.
Who woke up and made him king? Or something. I need more coffee, obviously.
I don’t have a Card in this deck. I used to read his weekly column during the war, because he he had a sort of neo-con point of view. I stopped reading them a few years ago and forget why.
UPDATE: I finally found a working link to Card’s “overthrow the government” piece — most recent articles just cut and paste the “offending” sentence from each other’s articles.
This is the paragraph in question along with its surrounding graphs:
Why should married people feel the slightest loyalty to a government or society that are conspiring to encourage reproductive and/or marital dysfunction in their children?
Why should married people tolerate the interference of such a government or society in their family life?
If America becomes a place where our children are taken from us by law and forced to attend schools where they are taught that cohabitation is as good as marriage, that motherhood doesn’t require a husband or father, and that homosexuality is as valid a choice as heterosexuality for their future lives, then why in the world should married people continue to accept the authority of such a government?
What these dictator-judges do not seem to understand is that their authority extends only as far as people choose to obey them.
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.
Biological imperatives trump laws. American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die.
***
OK, I’ll play the game liberals play:
Card is speculating on what other people might do, one day, if they got fed up.
The “I” is clearly connected to the imaginary people he’s speculating about.
He should have used quotation marks but it’s too late for that now.
Why, he’s “just asking questions”!
He is also making a point that pro-gay marriage types hate to bring up, which may be why few critics have linked to his entire — and frankly, very sensible and sober — op-ed:
That gay marriage almost always fails on democratic ballot initiatives and has to be pushed through by unelected judges.
Therefore, Card argues, democracy in America is dead anyway. Therefore it may be our duty to overthrow this illegitimate government.
Millions of Americans felt that Bush’s eight year presidency was illegitimate, foisted upon the nation by unelected judges.
I don’t doubt for a moment that a select few of those millions of Americans wrote and illustrated comic books and worked unmolested in many branches of the entertainment industry.
Has Orson Scott Card actually physically in meat space tried to overthrow the government?
Can someone show me surveillance footage of him buying suspiciously large quantities of fertilizer?
Why is Bill Ayers rewarded by the powers that be while Card is banished?
By the way, I love the way total strangers are claiming “ownership” over Superman as part of their “arguments.”
Guess what: Superman is half-Canadian. Maybe as a Canadian, I don’t recognize your “ownership” of Superman, and think Card should write the story line.
UPDATE: Here is the 1990 thing, with a new introduction by Card:
This essay was published in February of 1990, in the following context: The Supreme Court had declared in 1986 (Bowers v. Hardwick) that a Georgia law prohibiting sodomy even in the privacy of one’s own home was constitutional. I was also writing this essay to a conservative Mormon audience that at the time would have felt no interest in decriminalizing homosexual acts. In that context, my call to “leave the laws on the books” was simply recognizing the law at that time, and my call to not enforce it except in flagrant cases was actually, within that context, a liberal and tolerant view — for which I was roundly criticized in conservative Mormon circles as being “pro-gay.” Those who now use this essay to attack me as a “homophobe” deceptively ignore the context and treat the essay as if I had written it yesterday afternoon. That is absurd — now that the law has changed (the decision was overturned in 2003) I have no interest in criminalizing homosexual acts and would never call for such a thing, any more than I wanted such laws enforced back when they were still on the books. But I stand by the main points of this essay, which concerns matters internal to the Mormon Church.
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