Positive Liberty

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine sent me the following note:

i was just informed that Orson Scott Card will be joining the marvel [Comics] team in march to write ultimate iron-man. This person has openly expressed his disdain and intolerance of homosexuality in this essay:

http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-02-15-1.html

i am very upset that my favorite comic book company has decided to employ a closed minded bigot and i encourage everyone who agrees with me to express it to marvel. i have written them an email threatening boycott if this occurs, on their site:

http://www.marvel.com/company/feedback.htm

i encourage everyone to do the same, i am also going to write letters (snail mail) in protest of this disgusting choice. as gay people, we should band together, spread the word and try to prevent this from happening!

Consider me a skeptic. Boycotts are seldom effective unless they utterly devastate the target: Anything less is only an embarrassment to the side who called the boycott in the first place, as it becomes a demonstration of practical weakness rather than a proof of moral strength. Orson Scott Card is a runaway commercial success, and it’s absurd to think that even a successful boycott of one comic book is going to change matters in the least.

Let there be no mistake, though, that the target would richly deserve such a failure. Here is a taste of what Card believes about homosexuals:

[H]omosexual “marriage” is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society — to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.

So if my friends insist on calling what they do “marriage,” they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is.

Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage.

They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes.

It goes without saying that some of Card’s best friends are homosexuals. In cases like his, the offender always scrounges up some “best friends” to make his reasoned, thoughtful discrimination seem more legitimate. And no, Card doesn’t want anyone thinking he is intolerant. It turns out that homosexuals are suffering, and he, Card, is the only one frank enough to admit it. The following comes from a 2000 interview in Salon:

The homosexuals that I’ve known well, I have found none who were actually made happier by performing homosexual acts. Or by withdrawing, which is what they do, from the mainline of human life. The separation is there and is, in fact, celebrated within the homosexual community.

It was late afternoon of December 23 when I read these lines. The night before, I had gone with my husband Scott to visit his family. Our family. We spent the evening with Scott’s two brothers and their girlfriend and fiancée. Over the course of the day, we ate dinner together, watched movies, went shopping, wrapped Christmas presents, exchanged gifts, and caught up on family news. I wondered what part of this was somehow less than a family–and how, exactly, I was separating myself from the mainline of human life.

Here’s what Card might have said about our so-called family gathering; it comes from his personal website:

The ideologues have demanded that we stop defining “families” as Dad, Mom, and the kids. Now any grouping of people might be called a “family.”

But this doesn’t turn them into families, or even make rational people believe they’re families. It just makes it politically unacceptable to use the word family in any meaningful way.

No, to be a family, you have to have the proper parts in your underwear. Anything else doesn’t count. And–strawman alert–someone, somewhere, wants to break up mom, dad and the kids.

The following day, Christmas Eve, Scott and I drove west to the family hometown, to be with mom and dad, grandma, grandpa, and all the rest. The brothers and significant others will be along shortly, as will a seemingly endless host of cousins, aunts, and uncles. The matriarch of the family is a great-grandmother eight times over who may well live to see several more. She’s not quite sure what to make of me yet, but one thing is for certain: She knows perfectly well that I’m part of the family.

Perhaps I am just being an ideologue, but I’ll take her definition of “family” over Card’s any day. And that goes double on Christmas.

Now I could rant about Orson Scott Card’s anti-gay views forever, but that’s not what I really want to do here. What struck me most about Card’s stance is not how differently we see things–but how much we are the same. In a world not so far removed from our own, in a world where I had turned out straight instead of gay, I would most certainly be writing on his side. If, that is, I bothered to write about those irresponsible gays at all.

Perversely, Card diagnoses the problems before our society with perfect accuracy: The American family really is disintegrating. All too often, homosexuals really are isolated from the mainline of human life. Far more than we like to admit, gays come from broken homes and don’t have a mom or dad to spend the holidays with. A great many of us are lonely and unhappy.

And in a world not so far removed from our own, a straighter Jason would lay the blame for all of this at the feet of the gays themselves. After all, they–and not I–had broken nature’s laws. In a world not so very different, it would be easy for me to spend Christmas with my less tolerant biological parents, who would still welcome a girlfriend or a fiancée, but who turn my husband away at the door. In a world not so different, it would be so easy for me to think in Card’s terms.

I suspect it would be easy for many of you, too.

Don’t tell me that you and I are too intelligent for such homophobia, or that we have some higher moral sense than a certain bigoted idiot. Orson Scott Card is neither an idiot nor a bigot. He has one of the finest ethical sensibilities of any writer I have ever encountered; he is a thinker of surpassing discernment with a profound understanding of the human condition.

And I have effectively bet my life that here, this one time, he is flat-out wrong.

Card is a perfect illustration of something that the gay rights movement has yet to struggle with in any serious form: Throughout the past, the present, and the future so far as we can see it, there have been and will be decent, intelligent people who disagree with us in the strongest of terms. Surprising as we may find it, the intelligent and profoundly thoughtful Orson Scott Card has emerged as perhaps the best living advocate of the anti-gay position, not only because of his widespread readership, but also for his beautiful prose and his remarkably lucid, reasonable thinking.

I take heart when he stumbles, which is admittedly seldom. Here is a revealing slip from the same interview in Salon:

In our culture today, there are a lot of people who use the fundamental Christian doctrine — to love your neighbor, to forgive all men — only as a weapon to silence Christians! The effort to hold Christians to this particular standard is very unfair.

But surely, if the command to love one’s neighbor has any meaning at all, it must include those people that you would otherwise prefer to dislike.

I also take heart that such stumbles happen even to the greatest among us. Plato was gifted with the most incisive mind that the West has ever seen–and with a frank love for authoritarianism. Aristotle held that women were incomplete, inferior versions of men. And a long list of supposedly great moralists–including the authors of the New Testament–all wrote in support of slavery. If these can err, then so too can Orson Scott Card, who is by no means their match.

Moving toward the present, I would never dare to put my intellect on the same plane as Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, or Aldous Huxley. All three were far more intelligent, more moral, more creative than I am. All three are personal heroes of mine, individuals who were better than I am at everything I have ever seriously attempted. They were likewise better at all the things that might make someone a decent judge of this issue. And again, I’m betting my life that they were wrong.

What I have said of the great, though, applies doubly for me. I’m small, and I make mistakes all the time. Even when I am trying to put the best face on the things I think and believe, even here, where I allow myself to post only when I think I’ve done something truly perfect–I look back at the entries of a few months ago and cringe at how I could have been such an idiot. Yet here I am, compelled to live and to think, one way or another. So is everyone.

Our lights, all of them, are dimmer than we imagine, and in the end we are not so different from one another after all. The supporters of our cause, or of any cause, will win no credit by saying that the only opposition consists of bigots and morons. In a profound sense, we are all bigots and morons. It’s not an especially happy message this Christmas, but there it is. Let us strive to understand, and strive to be cheerful anyway.