Orson Scott Card Wants YOU (To Rise Up Against The Gay Menace)

By:: Michael Swaim

August 11, 2008

To those to of you who haven't read Ender's Game by Orson Scott card, warning: two spoilers follow. Spoiler 1: Your childhood was incomplete. Spoiler 2: You know that part where Ender fights that kid Bonzo in the showers and kicks him so hard in the nuts that he kills him? Well, Card basically did the same thing to logic and decency last week when he tried to convince the American Citizens in his thrall (myself once among them) to invoke their right of revolution and overthrow the government to stop gay marriage from being legalized. That's right, people. The Mormon guy who wrote all those books about the innocence of a child winning out over war and hatred wants us to raise arms against any queers who feel like expressing their love legally. I mean, I understand a devout Mormon having some issues with gayness, but when your brain tells you that it's an important enough issue to divide the country in a bloody coup, it's time to get a new brain.

I'm sure there'll be a whole cavalcade of comments following this post pointing out the merits of homosexuality, its moral deficiency in the eyes of God, and stuff about boobies touching and wieners in butts. So I figured, rather than try to pre-emptively defuse the situation like I usually do, I'll just say to hell with it and let you know how I really feel. If you totally disagree, feel free to comment, we can agree to disagree, and you can come back in a few days and read something funny I wrote about a celebrity pooping themselves. HOW I REALLY FEEL: Orson Scott Card, you are, and I say this with the reservation of someone who read Speaker for the Dead and wept on a city bus, the worst. I will never buy or read your books again, and I am withdrawing my membership from the Card Superfriends Fan Team and Party Brigade (Sorry, Chet and Dale).

The Mormon's I've known (all lovely people) have always been particularly impervious to logic, but it's all I've got so here I go. Mr. Card, you are as evil, and will one day be as reviled by any sane individual, as an 18th-century slave owner. Let me explain. Throughout the history of America, and indeed in the course of any developing culture, the universal historical trend (with some notable, but temporary deviances) has been towards expanding rights for an expanding number of people. Women couldn't vote, now they can. Blacks were treated like pack animals, now they get to live in the inner city and some of them own nice cars. The point is, PROGRESS. There is no question, absolutely none at all, that you are fighting a battle you can't win. In a hundred years, flamboyant gay guys will be getting married in fabulous dresses on your grave, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. But worse, when that day finally comes, you will be classed with all those others who stood in the way of expanding rights and humanity: the Ku Klux Klan, Apartheid, the anonymous boardroom of fat men arguing about which secretary has the best ass. And if there's any justice, even though I've no doubt you could fire off a response to this post that would be perfectly eloquent and arresting (in fact, you totally should, my hits would go through the roof), your work will be read only as a curiosity, a way to peek into the mind of a caveman. Or else by lovers of great fiction, who will have to read them, set them down, shrug, and say "well, that was super good, even

if the guy was a Neanderthal Nazi."

And really, what the hell does it matter to you if two hot lesbians want to settle down and be respectable (which isn't the way I like my hot lesbians either, believe me)? Until such a time as they bring down your property values with raging lesbian drug orgies, you've got nothing legitimate to complain about, and even then, I'll trade houses with you. Nothing to complain about, that is, besides the so called "degradation" of the Biblical standard of marriage. Upon what are you basing that? A passage or two saying that God hates gays? You know, there's also a lot of passages about stoning your children to death for disobedience, but I don't see you cleaning your guns on that account. Clearly you have taken it upon yourself to prioritize certain portions of the Bible. I am forced to ask then, why in the world would you choose to prioritize the relatively tiny portion about hating and oppressing your fellow men and women, instead of giving precedence to the mountain of passages espousing the virtues of love and compassion for all of God's children? Or at least the hilarious parts about people having sex with gold statues (Ezekiel 16:17 NIV)?

What would Jesus do? If you can answer that question with anything other than "shower the world with endless love and understanding, then flip a wicked ollie on a flaming skateboard," then you and I have a

very different understanding of the man. So get with fucking program and stop masking your own personal homophobia as a religious issue. It's not. It's a nothing issue that shouldn't even be a question, and yet has been allowed to dominate the political landscape at a time when thousands of deaths around the world are crying out to be addressed. You've spent your life imagining diverse races and cultures, and doing a hell of a good job. Yet your inability to imagine true love manifesting between two members of the same sex almost classifies you as retarded in my mind. It's not even a moral issue. You're just an idiot to me. And not just an idiot. I've seen you in person, Orson. You're fat. And rich. How about working on some of those deadly sins before throwing the first stone?

I know it's pointless to ask you to change your mind; bigots armed with the intransigence of religion are rarely swayed. But hopefully some of those reading this post will be forewarned that Orson Scott Card has become a poison-spouting lunatic. And in the interest of providing yet another argument for gay marriage being a non-issue, as well as some modicum of comedy, here's a list of the gayest things about heterosexual marriage:

It expects everyone to dress well and be on time.
It involves a lot of lace, and at the end the guy cries sometimes.
Unless something's gone terribly wrong, no one is pregnant.
Those tiny sausages they sometimes serve.
There's a big foofy cake, like the gays are always having.
Unless I'm sorely mistaken, God's got no problem with it.

When not blogging for Cracked, Michael's being fired from his position as a Cracked blogger for being "too real" and devoting the rest of his time to Those Aren't Muskets!