In an exclusive with Entertainment Weekly, sci-fi author and NOM board member Orson Scott Card had this to say in response to the planned boycott of Ender's Game, due out this fall:
Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.
With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.
Now 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.
He didn't make nearly as loud of a fuss about the panning of Hamlet's Father. A few notes about his statement:
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Issues regarding gay rights did exist in 1984. During the devastation of AIDS, loving men were denied the right to visit and comfort their dying partners because to the law they were not husbands but strangers. Media outlets not covering the issues doesn't mean they did not exist, and to claim otherwise is to whitewash history and justify the cruelty of one's own prejudices. His line is a misdirect in any case; people are protesting Card for his views, not the movie for its content.
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Yes, the Full Faith and Credit clause will likely render state bans on gay marriage moot, eventually. It will not invalidate Card's decades of hateful statements: that homosexuals are the products of abuse and rape and suffer from "tragic genetic mixups"; that homosexual acts should have remained criminal actions; that any government that would change the definition of marriage is his "mortal enemy" that he would act to destroy.
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The implication that boycotting is an act of intolerance and thus infers that to be tolerant one would have to see his movie. In other words, you have to pay Orson Scott Card in order to prove that you're tolerant of him.
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Oppressed people are under no obligation to be tolerant of the bigoted views of their oppressors. Likewise, the intolerant have no grounds to demand that they be tolerated.
The timing and content of his statement exposes the craven, unprincipled greed of this man. He threw NOM under the bus and offered a withered olive branch only when his side had already lost, and even then only did so when opposition to his views threatened box office revenues.
The site for Skip Ender's Game can be found here.
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