I think I was talking to someone here about the Orson Scott Card rant against gay marriage, which pretty much ruined every happy memory I had of reading his books as a kid. So here's some infuriating, head-exploding examples of his propaganda/fear mongering, "logic", and bigotry, in that order:
"Already in several states, there are textbooks for children in the earliest grades that show 'gay marriages' as normal. How long do you think it will be before such textbooks become mandatory -- and parents have no way to opt out of having their children taught from them?"
"If a court declared that from now on, 'blind' and 'sighted' would be synonyms, would that mean that it would be safe for blind people to drive cars?"
"With 'gay marriage,' the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun."My childhood hero is fucking dead to me.
On a happier note, I'm not even a parent and I found this to be an awesome alternative to the horribleness we watched on Sunday!
Both via GeekDad
10 comments:
Wow, that's fantastically depressing; watching him use his mind (which I kind of liked before, and now seems to have rotted somewhat) to dig up and construct every possible reason why he has a right to be so mad about two dudes he doesn't even know getting hitched. My favorite (and by "favorite", I mean "least favorite") is the whole Activist Judge trope, which sounds suspiciously like the State's Rights argument trotted out by slave owners right before the Civil War.
What I don't get is how upset people get about the abstraction of marriage, how a marriage you don't approve of somewhere, anywhere in the world, in any way affects your own. I think the analogy here might be this: Say you drink a Zima, the very first week it came out. You like it. You decide it's your drink. You buy sixteen cases of Zima. Then, the next week, they start in with those ads, with the dude in the fedora, replacing all of his S's with Z's. Say you find these ads annoying. You feel bad that you like Zima. You wish you hadn't bought all that Zima, and feel like those ads have ruined all that Zima in your basement. You know what? GROW THE FUCK UP. You liked it before. Is it different now? It's not. Has a bad marketing campaign somehow cheapened your Zima? Maybe, but not in any way that should seriously bother you, you fucking baby (unless you only liked Zima because you thought it was cool, in which case you are also a fucking baby). Like the Zima guy says, who cares? Go down into your basement and drink your fucking Zima, you baby.
Gaaah! By this reasoning, if enough gay people get married, the pious will be forced to start getting divorced, as marriage is devalued to the point of meaninglessness (Or, I guess, they will overthrow the government).
MORE BAD REASONING: He ends patly stating that "Biological imperatives trump laws." Whoooooa! Not thirteen sentence-paragraphs back, he's all "Men routinely discard wives and children to follow the nearly universal male biological desire for diversity in mating." I can't even try to explain that disconnect. Maybe the proper analogy is something like LOOK AT MY ROTTING BRAIN
This is so sad. But Ender's Game is my favorite book. It's still my favorite book. I want to give it to my sons to read one day. I still will. I've read it like twelve times; I'm pretty confident that there's nothing terrible encoded in it, at least nothing as hateful and intellectually dishonest as this essay (I guess there's that bit where Ender calls that kid a buttwatcher, or something, but that's like, whatever.) I sure won't staple a copy of his essay to the book. But just because Card's brain rotted out, doesn't mean his book changed somehow. Just like how my marriage isn't actually affected by all the marriages between hateful and intellectually dishonest douchebags (marriages that the state fully recognizes, by the way.)
That Star Wars movie was really dark.
"there's nothing terrible encoded in that book"
Other than the successful programming of a child to commit genocide, you mean, right?
Biological imperatives trump laws, Galspanic.
I made the same discovery about brother Orson a while back, it sucks!
The first three books of Alvin Maker are also pretty amazing, and the one about the post-apocalyptic mormons wasn't terrible either. Sigh. I was biologically impelled by the vid, though!
Hitler apologist! Hitler apologist!
(added Nazi's to the label list ^_^)
I will never apologize to Hitler.
Look, this dude agrees, in a super-a-lot more articulate way!
Ugh, also.
Enjoyed the Zima analogy.
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