Orson Scott Card

[Anthony Ravenscroft]

As much as I criticise people-as-a-group, I'm a social animal. I count among my close friends people with whom I actively avoid discussing stuff like politics or religion, because other than being narrow-minded idjits in rather specific regions of thought, they're lovely people.

I stopped reading Card like 20 years ago. It just didn't work for me. And there's so much other great stuff out there (whether Lit'ry tomes or mindless space-battle skiffy) that Card's fiction simply fell off the list. So, I can't say that I abandoned him for publicly stating his own views.

But he seriously creeped me the hell out back in 2004 with his extensive treatise against homosexuals & their fellow travellers:

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

His defenders can put enough spin on it that wormholes would be spawned like maggots on a dead horse, but the fact is that he calls for armed insurrection to put down the "War on Marriage." A Card passage not in the above essay sums it up:

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 ... .

For a guy who makes a living from writing, it's kinda disingenous for him to claim he's a pacifist advocating for peaceful change through the democratic process.

[FrankChurch]

There are so many other great writers, why bother? You just fuel his right wingism.

[Steve Evil]

Isn't Card a Mormon? He'd be in a very poor position to lecture anyone else about the sanctity of marriage. . .

But why do these people care so much what other people do in their homes?

I try to sperate an artist's views from their art, but it isn't really possible. Art comes from the self, and if the self is such a seething mass of hatred, it's difficult to see how that wouldn't filter into the art. Blatantly didactic fiction - that is, fiction that doesn't try to embrace the complexities of life but instead peddles one particular viewpoint or philosophy - really isn't art. Or at the very least, it tends to bore me. Whether great art or simple space opera.

[Ezra Lb.]

I have to admit I never much paid attention to Mr Card's political opinions. He does seem to be a 14 carat right wingnut though. What is funny is the assumption that just because a person can write good fiction that this means his or her other opinions are worth listening to. I have the same view of the other side as well. Would somebody tell Arundhati Roy to please shut the fuck up and write another wonderful novel like The God of Small Things!