Orson Scott Card (3)

After performing a Google Search on Hypocrites of Homosexuality Orson Scott Card  I hit on a plethora of blogs, netlogs, message lists, and the like thoroughly discussing both the original essay and the followup, Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization, written in February of last year (2004).  One site, Frankenblog, does an excellent job of parsing the logic and lack of it in both essays, exposing the language which is inflammatory and cruel.  Another message list, Aint it Cool News has a lively debate about the same.  There have been quite a few comic book sites dealing with these issues as well.  Apparently OSC has been hired to write Ultimate Iron Man for Marvel Comics. 

I find the arguments of the few who cannot see the bigotry inherent in the essays remarkable and interesting.  They do not see the minimization of our relationships, the demonizing of a whole group of people, the comparisons with children and the insane, the advocation of selective imposition of the law to silence those who aren't discreet.  That particular idea is very troubling.  What is the definition of indiscreet?  Card never says.  Who would decide?  The police?  And finally his assertion that people who choose to be or are different cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

I don't understand how people cannot see such language as anything other than bigoted.  Note here that I'm not going to call OSC a bigot or a homophobe.  I agree with him that such terms are bandied about without thought.  I disagree with him about the reason such epithets are used.  He believes that they are used to victimize him and squelch his speech.  I believe that people call him such things as a way of venting their outrage.  They feel real pain upon reading his essays and they retaliate.  They reduce him to a concept rather than a flawed human being.  I don't want to make that same mistake. 

But my own outrage is fueled primarily because I feel duped.  I loved his books, especially Songmaster.  I thought "here is someone who understands  the gay psyche."  I still believe that to be the case.  He can't have fooled me, it was very true.  He wasn't making it up.  Is Orson Scott Card really gay?  Who knows.  He must have at least visualized the gay relationship in Songmaster.  He has stated elsewhere that he has been thought to be queer himself.  The worst homophobes are always the closest to the closet.  Normal straight people really don't care this much.

Halloween Irony

File this one under "Irony to the point of absurdity": Pastor electrocuted while performing a baptism.

One doesn't want to be observed chuckling at such things, but it's very difficult to master the impulse. 

How do I hate Halloween?  Let me count the ways....  I just got a visit from the crocodile hunter.  Krikey!  Earlier there have been witches, marines in camoflage, the CSI investigation team, a dirty ape from Planet of the Apes, and horror upon horrors, even a lawyer or two. 

I myself have come as Orange Juice.  I have a fedora, hornrimmed spectacles, orange ribbons hanging from my sideburns and an orange shawl.  Sometimes I can be heard to exclaim, "Oy jay!"  If only I could have figured out a way to get circumcision worked in.  However, that might have taken the joke into the realm of bad taste, so I'm happy this way.  The problem with being orange is that everyone thinks that I'm a pumpkin, a Hasidic pumpkin, but a pumpkin.  Once I tell them what I am I usually get a pretty big laugh. 

Orson Scott Card (2)

Yesterday I was too close to the boiling point and I don't feel that I supported my opinions well enough to be persuasive.  Let's look over The Hypocrites of Homosexuality and parse out why it's so offensive.  Clearly Card doesn't understand why it is offensive since he evinces confusion over opposition to its content.  Perhaps those well-intentioned souls among my readers might read the essay and think that Card "hates the sin and loves the sinner."  While that may be true, as he claims, there is far more in the essay that establishes proof of a mind enmeshed in bigotry.

First, I will stipulate to the fact that 90 percent of The H of H is concerned exclusively with the policies of the LDS church.  I don't give a rat's ass what the LDS church thinks and never will.  They are perfectly free to believe whatever nonsense they wish and require their membership to believe the same.  No.  I'm concerned with the 10 percent of the essay that deals with "the polity" as Card calls it, the role of homosexuals within the larger society, American society. 

I did learn that for most of them their highest allegiance was to their membership in the community that gave them access to sex.

Here Card reduces our relationships to merely the quest for sex.  This diminishes our lives and relationships, dehumanizes us, and is patently offensive.  It is also intellectually disingenuous as the very same thing could be said about his membership in the LDS community.  And how would he react if someone reduced his community to merely a group of people who gave each other access to sex?

In paragraph 9, Card compares gays (I simply cannot continue to use the term "homosexual") to children and the mentally ill.  We are either immature or insane.  This is the modern way of demonizing us, and it is intellectually disingenuous.

In paragraph 12, Card goes off track completely, taking his argument out of the LDS church and into society at large.  Here is where his argument must be forcefully engaged. 

This applies also to the polity, the citizens at large. 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 whoflagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

Obviously his essay was written before the most recent ruling by the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, but nevertheless sodomy statutes were uninforceable and unconstitutional then just as they are now.  He should have known better.  Furthermore, he advocates using laws selectively in order to quell the First Amendment Rights of those who disagree with the view of the majority.

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.

Again, Card is advocating using the awesome power of the government to control the thoughts and behavior of people with whom he disagrees.  He places some people's relationships ahead of, or better than, others.  This is unAmerican.  Our system provides equanimity for everyone.  He further advocates using law to squash the First Amendment rights of those with whom he disagrees.  Be discreet, or else go to the slammer.

The rest of his dissertation can easily be dismissed as self-serving sophistry.  His real aim, I suggest, was to represent himself as a mainstream member of the LDS church.  Doubtless Songmaster raised more than a few eyebrows in Salt Lake City.  There were parts of that novel which dealt compassionately with homosexuality.  When I first read it, and had no inkling of Card's religion or religiosity, I was quite moved.  I found it sympathetic to gay sensibilities.  I believe that with his essay, Card is trying to distance himself from that book, and to justify why he was so kind to his gay characters (kind?--one of them commits suicide by eating a towel) and reassure the Mormon hierarchy that he's one of the faithful.  I believe this was why he wrote this screed, and that is at the minimum a dual motive, if not pure hypocrisy.

Fortunately for me, I grew up in the Lutheran church, a church from which you cannot be excommunicated (that I know of).  It has a far less rigid hierarchical authority than the LDS church.  I find it frankly amazing that Card uses scriptures to justify his trope against gays while ignoring the following passage:

Galatians 1:8-9

8But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! 9As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!

the Angel Moroni, anyone?

Orson Scott Card=Homophobia

Homophobia is defined as the neurotic fear of homosexuals.  For most people this means gay bashing.  Intellectual writers such as Orson Scott Card hide their neurotic fear behind a bevvy of fine words meant to project their own sin onto others.  It is thus my mission to acquaint fans of his fiction with his vile manifesto called "The Hypocrites of Homosexuality" which can be found here.  Note how he spends half the essay saying that homosexuals who have any kind of self esteem must be shunned, while the rest of his cant is a screed of whining and kvetching about catching heat for his loathsome viewpoint. 

His "religion" has no tolerance for debate, no room for any but the most authoritarian viewpoint.  All must bow to the will, not only of God, but of their graven image: The Prophet.

His essay is the moral equivalent of "The Eternal Jew" or Wagner's "Jews in Music."  My mere words cannot express how loathsome I find his viewpoints.  I find that most of those who are acquainted with this essay turn away from their admiration of his fiction.  Like Wagner he may be a completely repugnant polemicist, but an artist of surpassing merit.  However, I do not have to stomach it.

 

Intelligent Design

"Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex it must have been created by some kind of higher intelligence."

Similar reasoning has frequently been displayed by various advocates of the theories that any one of a dozen intellectuals of the renaissance authored Shakespeare's plays, rather than the Bard himself.

None of these people seem to grasp the concept of Occam's Razor when it comes to science or literary criticism.  Oh, wait a sec, that's it!!! William of Ockham wrote Shakespeare's plays!  Eureka. 

Karma (1)

What goes around comes around.  Looks like the Bush Administration's dirty tricks policies are at last reaping bitter fruit.  There's no way they'll be able to smear their way out of this one.  We can only hope that tomorrow brings indictments aplenty for this gang of criminals.  May they go down in Plames. 

Surrey

Back from Surrey with an incredible desire to go forward and write, write, write and publish, publish, publish.

I met Donald Maass, the powerhouse literary agent who has seminars all across the country concerning writing the breakout novel.  That's the title of his book: Writing the Breakout Novel.  He signed my copy with the following epigraph: "Tension on every page."  His workshop on pacing echoed that sentiment.  You can always try to rephrase a sentence to evoke more tension.  Each and every sentence in your novel.

I was invited to send samples to two editors.  I've tried sending to Donald Weise at Carroll & Graf, but his e-mail doesn't seem to be working.  I called to confirm his e-mail address and left a message.  I guess I'll have to send hard-copy. 

The experience was tremendous.  I can't wait until next year.