In relating Ender Wiggin’s childhood and training in Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card presents a harrowing tale of abuse.  Ender’s parents and older brother, the officers running the battle school and the other children being trained there, either ignore the abuse of Ender or participate in it.

Through this abusive training Ender becomes expert at wielding violence against his enemies, and this ability ultimately makes him the savior of the human race.  The novel repeatedly tells us that Ender is morally spotless; though he ultimately takes on guilt for the extermination of the alien buggers, his assuming this guilt is a gratuitous act.  He is presented as a scapegoat for the acts of others. We are given to believe that the destruction Ender causes is not a result of his intentions; only the sacrifice he makes for others is.  In this Card argues that the morality of an act is based solely on the intentions of the person acting.

The result is a character who exterminates an entire race and yet remains fundamentally innocent.  The purpose of this paper is to examine the methods Card uses to construct this story of a guiltless genocide, to point out some contradictions inherent in this scenario, and to raise questions about the intention-based morality advocated by Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead.

-John Kessel, Creating The Innocent Killer.

I wrote some time ago of Orson Scott Card’s decent into Timothy McVeigh land.  I wrote again sometime later of his second American civil war fantasy.  Step by step, he is taking the journey Timothy McVeigh once took.  I guess the only question now is does he have the nerve to actually do it, or is he just hoping he can incite one of his fans to?

Via Slog…

I’ve known for a long time now that Orson Scott Card is a homophobe. It’s why I haven’t read Ender’s Game, despite the recommendation of literally dozens of readers whose opinions I respect.

But this story informs me that things have escalated a bit on the Orson Scott Card front:

According to science fiction author Orson Scott Card…recent court decisions in Massachusetts and California recognizing same-sex marriage mean “the end of democracy in America.” As such, he advocates taking down our government “by whatever means is made possible or necessary.”

The article links to a hate-filled essay by Card in the Mormon Times. Here is his explanation why gay marriage is an abomination:

There is no natural method by which two males or two females can create offspring in which both partners contribute genetically. This is not subject to legislation, let alone fashionable opinion.

Human beings are part of a long mammalian tradition of heterosexuality. No parthenogenic test tube procedure can alter what we, by nature, are. No surgery, no hormone injections, can change X to Y or make the distinction nonexistent.

That a few individuals suffer from tragic genetic mixups does not affect the differences between genetically distinct males and females.

What’s I found interesting in the Mormon Times article is that Card is at least now willing to make a rhetorical nod to the vast body of modern science showing that gay people aren’t gay by choice, and to the reality that heterosexuals themselves are a bigger threat to the institution of marriage then same sex couples could ever be.  But his heart isn’t in it.  Here’s where the heart is:

Because when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary.

Society gains no benefit whatsoever (except for a momentary warm feeling about how "fair" and "compassionate" we are) from renaming homosexual liaisons and friendships as marriage.

Married people attempting to raise children with the hope that they, in turn, will be reproductively successful, have every reason to oppose the normalization of homosexual unions.

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.

Why should married people feel the slightest loyalty to a government or society that are conspiring to encourage reproductive and/or marital dysfunction in their children?

Why should married people tolerate the interference of such a government or society in their family life?

If America becomes a place where our children are taken from us by law and forced to attend schools where they are taught that cohabitation is as good as marriage, that motherhood doesn’t require a husband or father, and that homosexuality is as valid a choice as heterosexuality for their future lives, then why in the world should married people continue to accept the authority of such a government?

What these dictator-judges do not seem to understand is that their authority extends only as far as people choose to obey them.

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.

Biological imperatives trump laws.

You need to keep in mind, this is a man who made his fame and fortune with a story about a boy who wiped out an entire species of intelligent beings, yet was morally innocent of genocide.

There’s always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won’t reflect the storyteller’s true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he’s been persuaded of.

But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don’t even think to question, that you don’t even notice– those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations.
-Orson Scott Card

Yes it does Orson.  And not only in a writer’s fiction either.