Tolerance for Card

I have blogged about Orson Scott Card before. The column that he wrote for Mormon Times in which he makes thinly-veiled threats of anti-government violence is no longer available in it's original form, but the relevant quote is still available here. And here's a nice catalog of his bigotry.

I used to be quite alarmed about whether he was going to use whatever money he got from his fiction to fund the uprising he wrote about in that column.  But his latest pronouncement--asking for "tolerance" and declaring the issue of gay marriage "moot"-- shows that he's more committed to his bank account than his hatred.  I guess even bigots have their price.

I still think he'll use his money to fund hate groups like the National Organization for Marriage, and I will not be seeing Ender's Game.  And I do think there's a distinction here between an artist's personal views and an artist being a prominent hate activist, which is what Card has become.  Perhaps I'm splitting hairs here, but it does feel to me that there is a distinction between an artist who happens to be a dick (lookin' at  you, Harlan Ellison), an artist who has political views I don't agree with (hi, Dan Simmons!), and an artist who is a pro-bigotry activist. 

Again, maybe I'm splitting hairs because I don't want to research the views of every author I read.

But what I'd like to address is Card's plea for "tolerance."

I'm sure many other people have pointed out that Card is asking for something he hasn't shown. I'd like to explore something else.

I stopped reading Card years and years ago, before I knew about his bigotry, because it was clear to me that he was writing the same story over and over and over again.  The story is this: the specialest boy in the whole wide world overcomes adversity, which always includes the threat of possibly fatal violence at the hands of an older male relative who is threatened by the boys specialness.

I remember a particularly sexualized threat of violence in Ender's Game--the shower scene. I can't remember any other cases where the violence seemed sexualized, but I don't remember any of the other books very clearly. In any case, a boy being terrorized by an older male relative who should love and protect him is a prominent theme in Card's work.

I read about (but did not read, because why would I, or anybody for that matter) Card's book Hamlet's Father, in which the titular character is a pedophile who rapes a bunch of boys, thereby turning them gay.

You can draw your own conclusions about what's happened in Orson Scott Card's life.  I have drawn mine.

And so I can, based on my unfounded speculation extrapolated from his work, have some compassion for this dude.  Hatemongers like this aren't born--their souls are twisted into deformity by other people.  And for that, I have compassion.

But not tolerance. 

Because here's the thing. Many many people have been through incredibly awful things in their lives. Things that are impossible to get over. 

But at a certain point in your life, you have  a responsibility to the rest of the world to examine yourself and do the best you can possibly do to ensure that you don't become someone inflicting harm on others. 

Having lost my father at age 9, I was kind of an angry kid and used to lash out verbally a lot. And I felt kind of justified taking shots at the world that had wounded me. But it wasn't the people in the world who had wounded me, and there came a day (I think at some point when I was 17 or 18) when I realized I was becoming a real dick, and that I was driving people away with my nastiness, thereby confirming my fear that I was going to lose people who were important to me.  Any regular reader of this space can confirm that I'm still kind of a dick, but believe me when I say it used to be much worse.  So I made a still-ongoing, not-entirely-successful attempt to curb my dickishness.

Like I said, I'm not there yet.  But I've realized that I'm not in the right when I'm  punishing people who have no blame for what has happened to me.  And I think everyone has a responsibility to do the same.

You can't ask for tolerance when you're hurting people.  You can only ask for forgiveness. 

I wish Card would do that.  But until he does, the hell with him and his movie.