Orson Scott Card: Gay Marriage is 'Intolerant'

Orson Scott Card's probably just wishing this week would end.

It began with the gay group Geeks Out announcing their boycott of the big-screen adaptation of Card's famous sci-fi novel Ender's Game. The reason? Card's decades-long opposition to LGBT equality and gay people in general. The boycott, reported on around the world, led Card to release a reactionary statement in which he said, "It will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute." As noted yesterday, the implication here is that one must buy a ticket, thereby putting money in Card's pocket, if they want to prove they're "tolerant," a '90s-era buzzword that means not acceptance but endurance. To tolerate is to begrudgingly put up with; to accept is to include and embrace.

But Geeks OUT refuses to back down, or to let Card have the last work, so the group today posted another blog post highlighting more of Card's previous statements, such as his 2012 assertion that the left uses marriage equality as a "bludgeon to make sure that it becomes illegal to teach traditional values in the schools." Also, in 2004, Card claimed same-sex nuptials are in of themselves "intolerant" and that gays and lesbians, created by rape and molestation, are simply using marriage as an escape pod to "normalcy."

"But homosexual 'marriage' is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society--to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.
"...They are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage. They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes.
"The dark secret of homosexual society--the one that dares not speak its name--is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally."

Forget Card's bigoted, dangerous, and completely false hypothesis about rape and seduction and the like. Let's just focus on Card's claim that same-sex marriage is "intolerant." Does that mean that the thousands upon thousands of families being raised by same-sex couples are "intolerant" simply by their nature? Does that mean that daring to love someone of the same gender is "intolerant," and therefore same-sex love is not only "less-than" but an outright political attack? If that's the case, tolerance in Card's view means adhering to complete heteronormativity and staying on a pre-planned, prescribed path. But that doesn't sounds not like democracy, something Card claims to defend. It sounds like fascism.