Deseret News reports that Utah Valley University President Matthew Holland has been replaced on NOM's board by author and Mormon Times columnist Orson Scott Card.
So, let's meet NOM's newest board member:
"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."Thanks, NOM. You've just given me a great idea. Starting now, and for as long as Orson Scott Card sits on your board, we'll be posting a fresh OSC quote here every day. Today's entry will be filed under the title A Planet Called Treason
Oh, and all you Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Swedish, South African, Norwegian, and Canadian dictators, mark Orson's words, you will be replaced!
Update: This post has now been superseded by the following (identical) "WTF, Orson?" entries: here, here, here, here, and here.
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16 comments:
So which definition of marriage is Card talking about? The original Mormon definition or the post divine-revelation definition? Are we talking a man and a woman or a man and many girls/women? Darn, I hate it when they aren't clear about these things.
Here is an OSC quote for your books!
OSC has long been the voice of the Anti Gay Industry's real agenda.........
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 goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community in the polity's ability to provide rules for safe, stable, dependable marriage and family relationships.
Orson Scott Card --Science Fiction Writer
I was so very sad the day I found out OSC was an anti-gay bigot. When I read his book Songmaster I thought is was a sympathetic portrait of a bisexual character and gay love in general. Re-reading it after finding out what a whackaloon he was I realized that, for instance, Josef statement that he was "about ten percent attracted to sheep" was probably more serious and less sarcastic than I first thought. Maybe he is a better author than he realizes and the humanity accidentally spills out in his writing.
Orson Scott Card is a good person. I am a relative and I will vouch for him that he is not a bigot. Mormons, and people in general, can disagree with same-sex advocacy and still remain human. It is a possibility.
Oh, please, we're all human.
Now you've got me wondering which of your relatives vouched for Orson back when he was working for the George Wallace campaign?
And I also wonder if you are willing to vouch for NOM as well (considering how Orson now sits on the board of that organization, which has hurt and continues to target good people)?
Good person? My friends are good people.
And for as long as Orson makes targeting my friends part of his life's work, there will continue to be a small part of my life devoted to holding him to account for his bigotry.
Bigotry: an overused noun with reflexive attributes. Intolerance is a two-way street, it just depends upon your leanings on relativity in a particular context. So an intolerance to supposed antiquated theory and law is also included in the catapulted phrases of discrimination description.
I will state it again in defense of his character, that Orson Scott Card is a good person. I know this personally, and respectfully disagree with you.
Your disagreement is noted, Tod.
And your didactic tone, too.
I will admit I do believe you now when you say you're related to Orson.
Because you suffer from the same problem he does: Orson's so convinced that he's the smartest guy in the room that he's often the last one to recognize when his pronouncements are gibberish.
Anyway, feel free to hang out and disagree to your heart's content.
But don't expect anyone around here to be dazzled by the kind of word salad you just served up in the first graf of your latest comment.
They do call me a chef on the Food Network.
Tod- as I'm sure you'd agree, human beings are by and large not a readily reducible set of attributes.
Thus it is possible for Card to both be a good person and have a strong bias against homosexuals (and "homosexual sexual behaviours") much like it is possible to be racist and still kind (if probably patronising) to those you see as beneath you.
There are obvious but Godwin's Law fulfilling examples of the potential dichotomies between one's personal and political lives if this proof is insufficiently detailed for you.
Orson Scott Card has written some good science fiction and may make nice company, but the man(OSC) who wrote "Homosexual 'Marriage' and Civilization" http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-02-15-1.html
is not a good man or good American. Many of his arguments would work very nicely for Confederate sympathizers who would justify slavery and the denial of marriage (among other varieties) equality to black or interracial couples. We seek liberty and human dignity for all, that is the germ of greatness in America that produced Martin Luther King and the suffragettes, who replaced our slave holding, Indian genociding past with a future of racial and sexual equality that calls out our contradictions and points us to our better possibilities. Card cries about being called a bigot but when you arbitrarily diminish people based on who they are and how much more powerful you seek to make yourself at their expense, you are guilty as charged. He would have women denied the right to vote, because it diminishes the power of his male vote, if he followed his archaic nomad patriarchal structures to their natural conclusion after using them to delegitmize gay families with his one size fits all rule. People have roles he says, following his pastiche of bronze age ideology developed to breed more soldiers to follow packlike behind leaders who justify absolute power by the need to seize others' land to fuel racial and religious expansion, with total disregard for the original inhabitants' humanity. You can't question your role, or the authority that enforces those roles, otherwise there will be instability!?! Horrors. Well tough, the true American way is instability, women get to vote and own property, as do blacks, and we do have judicial review to shake up the legal logjams that the powerful use to hold back the powerless. We change and amend as we discover new challenges and confront old errors. Or would you prefer we had miscegnation laws and laws upholding unfair discriminatory housing practices? Those were popularly held standards, among the powerful classes at the time and voted on democratically. Just like the Free Slave Act of was enacted by the representatives elected by white male voters of the time, allowing black fugitives from slavery to be dragged from free states back to forced servitude and unchecked violence. Of course back then people proudly owned their bigotry, instead of whining about it like Card.
All this fancy talk doesn't change the fact that I just found out one of my favorite authors is a total dick.
Bigotry and intolerance of others was a very popular vantage FOR HITLER! Divisions are created by man...NOT God....
Did NOM do any research or did they really think that OSC would be such an asset?
I'm waiting for OSC to shut up and get back to science fiction. His political views sound an awful lot like Joseph Smith's where he advocates the overthrow of government, derides the Constitution, and acts just as paranoid with an abundance of conspiracy theories. What makes him worse than Joseph Smith is his advocacy to criminalize homosexuality.
But really, what's important here is the question of OSC and if he's a "good" man. He's no worse than any other traitorous radical. He should probably be on serious medication and lay off the jello salad for a while.
"Orson Scott Card is a good person. I am a relative and I will vouch for him that he is not a bigot. Mormons, and people in general, can disagree with same-sex advocacy and still remain human. It is a possibility."
Yes, a bigoted, misguided, superstious person who feels that the private behavior of others is his business.
Good people don't want other good people jailed for what they do in private.
A civil rights issue can't be redefined as opinion.
Besides, his revisionist nonsense in other arenas makes me wonder:
"Methinks he doth protest too much."
Personally I am deeply saddened that such a marvelous writer should use his prominence to in such an arrogant, didactic and empirical manner.
Soo the "nice" OSC is not the same prick that writes at the Navoo times? crap, I used to like the early OSC until I went back and read it as an adult, there's some very nasty reductionist crap in there. For example his most popular character Ender never picks a peaceful solution if he can obliterate his opponent. Leaving the unwritted fascism in his fiction writing I would LOVE to see him write on the disgusting misogyny that was Brigham Young and his immediate followers. Even his short stories are full of women as breeders.
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