Q Toon: Card Game

We'll get back to the royal baby in a moment, after this message from Geeks Out. Geeks Out wants everyone to boycott Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card on the grounds that he's antigay.

Unless you're deep into science fiction, you've probably never heard of the Ender's Game series or Orson Scott Card, but the 1985 book has been made into a movie set for release this November. Here's the plot: a remnant of humanity has been fighting an insectoid race of "buggers" (wait, wait, that's not what Geeks Out is upset about yet); the hero is one of the youth who have been trained during an uneasy truce to fight the next stage of the war. Fiery explosions, decapitations, impalings, and spattered ichor and guts festoon the screen.

Of more relevance to the current controversy is that Card is a board member of the National Organization for Marriage. The anger with Card stems from a article he wrote back in February, 1990, before most of Geeks Out were born:

“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 who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.”
— Orson Scott Card, “The Hypocrites of Homosexuality,” Sunstone Magazine

Sunstone Magazine, by the way, is a Mormon educational publication, so we do have a religious aspect to this story. And if you think that there's something incongruous about portraying the religious right gambling at cards, I would lay you odds that even One Million M*ms will be willing to overlook all the gratuitous violence in Mr. Card's film in order to burnish their antigay bona fides.

Card currently claims that his 1990 article is rendered moot by last month's Supreme Court decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, so everybody should cut him some slack. His own 2008 article for the Mormon Times argues otherwise:

"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 …"