Orson Scott Card isn't sorry. There is no contrition in his reaction to a boycott of Ender's Game, the forthcoming movie based on the card-carrying homophobe's science-fiction novel of the same name.
The boycott, organized by the LGBT group Geeks OUT, asks moviegoers to snub Ender's Game over Card's many, many statements against not only marriage equality but gay people as a whole. In a 1990 essay called "The Hypocrites of Homosexuality," Card wrote that "laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books."
"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."
He was obviously unaware his comments would form the basis of a gay boycott two decades in the future.
Launched over the weekend, Skip Ender's Game has already captured national attention, even with the movie's release four months away, and Card, once an ardent opponent of marriage equality and a board member for the National Organization for Marriage, is busying himself with damage control. And he's not doing a very good job.
Rather than taking cue from other anti-gay activists who have seen the light, or at least faced reality and come to terms with the inevitability of marriage equality, Card is calling on gay people to be "tolerant" of his beliefs, which he admits are "moot" only because of Full Faith and Credit, a constitutional clause that requires states to recognize other state's laws, including their marriage edicts.
"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," he told Entertainment Weekly in a statement that also claimed the 1985 novel came out before the States were even talking gay rights, a conversation that actually began in earnest in 1969. The sci-fi writer's temporal confusion is pretty out of this world.
Card goes on, "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." As Christian Walters at Towleroad points out, Card says seeing this movie proves tolerance, therefore, "You have to pay Orson Scott Card in order to prove that you're tolerant of him."
Card is so willing to sell out and abandon his beliefs for a buck that he doesn't seem to understand the irony of his "full faith and credit" argument. He claimed in 2008, during his heyday with NOM, that marriage equality "marks the end of democracy in America." He thought it would lead to the destruction of the body politic, but same-sex nuptials are doing the opposite: bolstering a constitutional clause designed to bring equality. Poor Card can't see that, though. He's too blinded by dollar signs and self-righteousness.
