Orson Scott Card: Fundie Asshole

[Iason Ouabache]

http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-02-15-1.html

Apparently Orson Scott Card (author of Ender's Game) is an fundie asshole.  He goes through the entire anti-gay marriage playbook in one column including "they are redefining marriage", "activist judges are undemocratic", "it will destroy the very fabric of our civilization", "no society has ever allowed gay marriage", "marriage is not a right", "we will be branded bigots for telling fags that they are going to hell", "homosexuals are already allowed to marry people of the opposite sex", "homosexuals can't have normal relationships because they don't conform to traditional gender roles", "homosexuals can't raise children properly", "it will destroy everyone else's marriages", "WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!", etc. 

He really raises the bar though by suggesting that we should overthrow the government just because he doesn't want gay people to marry:

http://mormontimes.com/ME_blogs.php?id=1586

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.

Is there anyway we could give this guy his own rocket ship and tell him to never come back?

[Nast]

It's about grandchildren. That's what all life is about. It's not enough just to spawn -- your offspring must grow up in circumstances that will maximize their reproductive opportunities.

Biological imperatives trump laws.

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.

Human beings are part of a long mammalian tradition of heterosexuality.

Lol, the blending of science and fundie values is such a fun mix. 
Cultural traditions become biological functions through a series of false connections and logical leaps.

I mean, it would be unhealthful for a woman not marry before she becomes reproductively inviable.
Also, masturbation causes blindness. True fact.

[Nast]

But there is nothing irrational about parents grieving at the abduction-in-advance of their grandchildren.

Don't you see the absurd contradiction? A postulated but unproven genetic disposition toward homosexuality is supposed to be embraced and accepted by everyone as "perfectly natural" -- but the far stronger and almost universal genetic disposition toward having children and grandchildren is to be suppressed, kept to yourself, treated as a mental illness.

Fuck that noise! This guy is so full of shit that not only is he pressing that whiny, victim-of-the-gay-media act, but he's also supporting a view in which procreation is the only biologically sound, and therefore morally upheld act of sex. And especially when he tries to support it through biological means.
He should stick to being a science fiction writer, at least there his scientific "views" can be taken with a grain of salt.

Also, parents are in no fucking way obligated to receive grandchildren. It is completely vile to use your children's bodies and rights to produce for yourself a grandchild in hopes of satisfying some sort of wacky genetic lineage. It is the parents' decision to have children, and the grandparent has no say in the matter what their children and their partners' reproductive rights are. That's just creepy.

[Cain]

Oh yeah.  Didn't you know about this?  He's a totally rabid Mormon now.

Consulting the Encyclopedia Wingnuttia (aka Thee Booke of Winged-Nuts donning Hats of Parties):

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/6360.html

Some people know Orson Scott Card as the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of such science fiction masterpieces as Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Others know him as the crazy homophobe who thinks we should lock up the queers so that they don't destroy our nation's reproductive security and sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids. But did you know that he's also got a fine career going as a sub-Victor-Davis-Hanson pseudohistorical bloviator? It's true!

In a recent and incredibly tedious essay, Card the brilliant academic (who currently holds an honorary professorship at Mormon-run Southern Virginia University) rambles on for roughly 28,000 pages about how our current situation is just like WWII, and al-Q'aeda is just like Hitler, and, uh, I guess Harry Reid is our Chamberlain. After refining this theory, which he developed while purchasing lawn gnomes at Target with James Lileks, several light-years past the point of comatose tedium, he gets to the meat of the matter by listing a number of lessons we must learn from the Second World War if we are to prevail against the dire threat of Muslamotarianism.

   

1. When the press has decided to report only one side of the story, the public is ill served.

And, of course, that's what's happening now. That's the reason that you only get the bad news from Iraq, and never the good news.

   

The people only know as much as they are told. Even when they say they don't trust the news media, in fact they do.

Got that? Even when they don't, they do. So there.

   

2. If you do not believe the threats of an insane enemy and destroy their war capacity early, when it can be cheaply done, you will pay for it in blood and horror.

Which, of course, is certainly a major concern today, because al-Q'aeda or Iraq or Iran or Syria or whatever other concatenation of sand-crazed beardos Card is talking about is certainly in possession of the economic, material and human resources necessary to wage war to the same degree or even worse than was Germany in 1939. Even as we speak, Syria's mighty battleships and fleets of stealthy, deadly submarines are masters of the seas, Iraq's vaunted tank commanders prowl the deserts unchallenged, Iran's terrifying air force rules the sky, and al-Q'aeda's armed forces, numbered at some 19 million men, exceeds even that of the fearsome Wermacht.

   

They will keep Europe from interfering with them, with medium range nuclear missiles and with large Muslim populations that are poised to revolt and terrorize in Europe.

Remember when England, with its large Muslim population, entered the Iraq War as our strongest ally? Those revolts just went on and on for weeks, didn't they? But in the end, it was all for the good, because we were able to seize all those medium-range nuclear missiles they had in Iraq.

 

3. Only fools believe that an enemy cannot do what he threatens to do.

Really? So, like, if al-Q'aeda said they were going to blow up the moon using their magical ice cannons, we would be fools not to believe that, right? Or if, say, the Iraqi information minister said that his forces were going to completely drive out the American invaders and roast them alive in their tanks, we'd be stupid to doubt it, right?

   

If we invade a nuclear Iran, they will simply detonate nuclear weapons over their own soil to destroy our armies.

They just would, that's all. They WOULD. SHUT UP.

 

4. Only fools allow their best allies to be neutralized before the war begins.

What Card means here is that if we withdraw from Iraq and don't attack Iran, we will lose our best allies when all our Muslim allies (which he doesn't name, possibly because we don't have any) are overthrown by Islamists, our best buddy Israel gets "slaughtered in a new Holocaust", and Europe will be taken over by jihadis who will force their governments into compliance.

Whereas me, if I was writing a sentence that started "only fools allow their best allies to be neutralized before the war begins," I might end it with "by systematically lying to them about the casus belli, and then telling them all to go get fucked when they didn't immediately bend over for our asinine, poorly-thought-out plan." But hey, I never won a Hugo.

[Gavin adds: Also, you know, the Soviet Union will put itself back together and ally with Zombie Rommel and his 5th Army of Nazi Skeletons, and they will march to the sound of balalaikas and spooky marimbas to. . .uh, Israel, which will be slaughtered in a new-new bioterror Holocaust even worse than the other one (flesh-eating nanobots). ...Except for the Palestinians, led by Zombie Gay Arafat, who will laugh and sneer amidst a cacophony of gunbursts and bhangra ringtones. Hey, you know, I never won a Hugo either. I think it requires a degree of imagination that I lack.]

Anyway, and you can thank me here for cutting dozens of pages of moist blow, Card goes on to conclude that right after — or even during — the invasion of Afghanistan, we should have also invaded Syria, which would have provoked Iraq into attacking us, which would have allowed us to attack Iraq without all the pussyfooting around, and then gone on to invade liberate Lebanon. All of this, argues the historically astute Orson, no doubt equipped with a long list of countries that have prevailed in a four-front war, would have made Israel "infinitely more secure". Got that? The best way to make Israel more secure is to invade all of its neighbors.

Since, like Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and 1864, President Bush has no reason to believe that his successor will pursue the war to victory, he has no choice, for the good of America and the world, but to defeat Iran before he leaves office.

I was kinda hoping that this sentence would lead to him saying that for the good of America and the world, Bush would have to declare the 22nd Amendment null and void and declare himself Maximum Leader, but Card lets me down. Still, the Civil War analogy is at least a break from the mindless repetition of the WWII metaphors; so, let me display my liberal historical ignorance and say how it looks to me. Bush deciding to invade Iran for the good of America does not particularly strike me as analogous to Lincoln vowing to achieve victory in the Civil War. That would be more like if Lincoln had first decided to declare war against Canada instead of the South in order to end slavery, and then, having done so, deciding that he would then put an end to slavery by going after its source, and launching a full-scale invasion of Africa.

Card's right: history does repeat itself. Every war, there's some dumb jackass like him spouting off ignorant analogies that fall apart like...well, like a house of cards after a long fart.



Furthermore:

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/4424.html

If someone from another planet came to earth and asked me to find two sentences that summarized the insanity of Glenn Harlan Reynolds, I'd probably choose these two:

 

Is America in danger of civil war? Not immediately, perhaps, but famed science fiction writer Orson Scott Card thinks that we're in enough danger that he's authored a cautionary tale entitled Empire that's set in more-or-less present times.

Is America in danger of being invaded by the Mole People? Not immediately, perhaps, but famed science fiction writer Stan Lee thinks that we're in enough danger that he's authored a cautionary tale entitled The Fantastic Four that's set in more-or-less present times.

But wait! That isn't even the best part of Glenn's column! Check out this doozy (my emphasis):

   

Card's cautionary tale is worth bearing in mind. Civil wars are, traditionally, among the most bloody, and the hardest to prevent once the ball gets rolling. So what do we do?

    One question is "who's 'we' here?" I don't see much of a sign that the American public — which, after all, overwhelmingly favored centrists in this month's elections — is as divided as Card suggests. But — as Card also notes — the elites are much more divided [...] To the "activist" crowd on the left and right, people who don't share their views 100% are evil, and on the other side.

Wow!! Who are those awful, nasty elites who accuse people they don't agree with of being "on the other side?" I can't believe anyone would be so partisan to accuse their fellow Americans of treason and...



And this:

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/4439.html


A big thanks to Roy for pointing me to this page, which contains several lengthy excerpts from Orson Scott Card's Empire. The book, for those of you who didn't read yesterday's post, is about a civil war that breaks out between red and blue states when "a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States." The main plot revolves around "Card's heroic red-state protagonists, Maj. Reuben 'Rube' Malek and Capt. Bartholomew 'Cole' Coleman" who "draw on their Special Ops training to take down the extremist leftists and restore peace to the nation."

The book's first five chapters are an all-out laughfest, jam-packed with the tired cliches and hammy polemics that we read on a daily basis from such leading conservative lights as Dan Riehl and Gary Ruppert. The prose reminds me of the stuff I wrote when I was 11 years old, just before I discovered the wonders of self-abuse. For a prime example, check out this sparkler:

    They had killed no one in front of these villagers, and in fact they had killed no one, ever, anywhere. Yet there was something about them, their alertness, the way they moved, that gave warning, the way a tiger gives warning simply by the fluidity of its movement and the alertness of its eyes.

Yes, there was something about the way they moved that had to do with their movement... that was LIKE A TIGER, BABY, GRRRRRRRRRR!!!

Anywho, there's a lot more where that come from, and I will dissect it tonight when I get home from work.

[Triple Zero]

yeah, ender's game was pretty great. the rest of the series, IMO, not so (even though there are a few interesting ideas in it)

what pissed me off especially was this one book in the series (Xenocide, i think?):

where you have this portugese/catholic colony on a planet interacting with a peculiar kind of tree/dog/pig hybrid aliens, they're acting out of a sort of "prime directive" (don't mess with the primitive aliens) kind of law, but end up converting these dirty pagans to jesus (i dunno how that even makes sense, christianity on a different planet--yeah we got lucky that the saviour birthed on OUR planet, not yours, but now we found you to tell you how you've been wrong all along) anyway the "researchers" (ahem, more like missionaries) go about doing all the typical christian crusade dumbfuckery, and some priest guy dies / gives his life and he's revered like a SAINT.
now in a parallel storyline there's this other planet where the people have some sort of Eastern Zen/Tao/Buddhist religion going on, and these people are caricatured as doing all sorts of pointless rituals, very repetitive stuff in order to get into trance and speak with the Gods. cause meditation is crazy and christian rituals like the eucharist are completely normal. anyway during the story it turns out they're not actually speaking to the Gods (if they were, they'd know about Jesus, after all), but that the entire planet is the result of some genetic experiment and the whole population is suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. yup. the non-christian religion of the other planet is in fact a disorder. so, the story bubbles along, and this young girl with the OCD ends up Saving The Planet and is rewarded for this by being locked up in a padded room and dies as an old CRAZY WOMAN.

sorry if i completely spoiled the plot for anyone still want to read it :-P

but Ender's Game is a really good read, IMO.

[Triple Zero]

we should lock up the queers so that they don’t destroy our nation’s reproductive security and sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

not our bodily fluids!!

The people only know as much as they are told. Even when they say they don’t trust the news media, in fact they do.

Got that? Even when they don’t, they do. So there.

whahahaaa

Which, of course, is certainly a major concern today, because al-Q’aeda or Iraq or Iran or Syria or whatever other concatenation of sand-crazed beardos Card is talking about is certainly in possession of the economic, material and human resources necessary to wage war to the same degree or even worse than was Germany in 1939. Even as we speak, Syria’s mighty battleships and fleets of stealthy, deadly submarines are masters of the seas, Iraq’s vaunted tank commanders prowl the deserts unchallenged, Iran’s terrifying air force rules the sky, and al-Q’aeda’s armed forces, numbered at some 19 million men, exceeds even that of the fearsome Wermacht.

They will keep Europe from interfering with them, with medium range nuclear missiles and with large Muslim populations that are poised to revolt and terrorize in Europe.

Remember when England, with its large Muslim population, entered the Iraq War as our strongest ally? Those revolts just went on and on for weeks, didn’t they? But in the end, it was all for the good, because we were able to seize all those medium-range nuclear missiles they had in Iraq.

3. Only fools believe that an enemy cannot do what he threatens to do.

Really? So, like, if al-Q’aeda said they were going to blow up the moon using their magical ice cannons, we would be fools not to believe that, right? Or if, say, the Iraqi information minister said that his forces were going to completely drive out the American invaders and roast them alive in their tanks, we’d be stupid to doubt it, right?

Cain stop it, my funny gland is about to splode!

If we invade a nuclear Iran, they will simply detonate nuclear weapons over their own soil to destroy our armies.

They just would, that’s all. They WOULD. SHUT UP.

IM SPLOIGNG!!!

[Gavin adds: Also, you know, the Soviet Union will put itself back together and ally with Zombie Rommel and his 5th Army of Nazi Skeletons, and they will march to the sound of balalaikas and spooky marimbas to. . .uh, Israel, which will be slaughtered in a new-new bioterror Holocaust even worse than the other one (flesh-eating nanobots). ...Except for the Palestinians, led by Zombie Gay Arafat, who will laugh and sneer amidst a cacophony of gunbursts and bhangra ringtones.

i'm not gonna quote all your post Cain but that was hilarious, thanks

[hooplala]

Card has written that an increase in crime in USA of the 1970s and 1980s "might well have been the result" of what he calls "the New Morality and the Pill" because they may have increased the number of babies born to "the people with poor impulse control" who are "most likely to be irresponsible parents."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card#Premarital_sex

Yes.  That's what all the crime was caused by.  One factor.

It should be VERY easy to fix then, right?  Right?

[Triple Zero]

"Card has called same-sex marriage a "potentially devastating social experiment" and argued that same-sex marriage is not necessary to ensure equal rights for all, since "Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law.""

[Cain]

Card has written that an increase in crime in USA of the 1970s and 1980s "might well have been the result" of what he calls "the New Morality and the Pill" because they may have increased the number of babies born to "the people with poor impulse control" who are "most likely to be irresponsible parents."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card#Premarital_sex

Yes.  That's what all the crime was caused by.  One factor.

It should be VERY easy to fix then, right?  Right?

Freakonomics argued the exact opposite - that the availability of the pill and Roe v Wade meant those children more likely to come from backgrounds which would help create criminals were aborted or never even fertilized little zygotes in the first place.

[Verbal Mike]

Ugh. I used to really look up to that dude. I liked his books a lot. The Shadow sub-series even more than the Ender sub-series...

[Suu]

SWEET JESUS!

[Contessa_Ugolino]

"Them queers don't need marriage. They can already git married. They just hafta marry someone of t' opposite sex."

This is one of my favorite arguments ever, because it is both technically correct and utterly bogus at the same time.

"Vegetarians can eat at the steak house. They just have to eat steak."

Interestingly enough, I have a dear friend who was heartened in his coming out process by a sympathetic gay character in one of Card's books, though I can't for the life of me remember which one.

[That One Guy]

Yeah, I ran across some of Card's rantings a while back. Sad that an author whose works I enjoy so much is such a raving fucking wingnut, but oh well. I know I won't be buying any more of his books.

[Triple Zero]

works? what is this plural you speak of? has he written anything besides Ender's Game that's really worth reading?

I mean, Speaker for the Dead was kinda nice, but not nearly as good and original as Ender's Game, IMO. and after that, the series obviously started to suffer from the "let's make a zillion sequels and get rich" fiction writers syndrome.

when at the end of one of the books (the third?) he brought out the clones, that was totally jumping the shark IMO

[That One Guy]

I can't enjoy Ender's Shadow? Or even Speaker for the Dead et al? I enjoy them - if you don't fine.