Orson Scott Card: homophobic Humpty Dumpty

by Yonmei

Update: In the comment thread to this post, one person responded

I’m just curious as to why we are even ceding this much space to O.S.C., to spend so much energy refuting him…? Does anyone in the community take him seriously? I don’t… further comment I do think, though, that answering to his views in this way validates them as being worthy of consideration. To me, they’re just stupid hate speech chucked into the same bin as white power propaganda – i.e., absurd and laughable.

I’ve added a political follow-up at the end of this post which explains why I think it’s worthwhile.

—
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

1. Humpty Dumpty: there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!

In Orson Scott Card’s most recent essay on same-sex marriage, he offers as a scientific hypothesis “It is not unfair to give unique preference to monogamous heterosexual relationships, if that preference and those marriages benefit all of society — including homosexuals or potential homosexuals.”

In an earlier essay, published at the beginning of June this year, Card wrote about something he still remembers his father saying to him when 9-year-old Scott brought a book on “cave men” home from school: “Whenever science and religion disagree, one or the other or both of them are wrong.”

Card claims this advice has stood him in good stead throughout his life:

The possibility that science could be wrong. The possibility that religion could be wrong. Our religion. The revealed religion.
Because that’s one of the things that is gloriously right about our religion: It is one of our articles of faith that there are things we do not know, that our present understandings may well be superseded by later revelation.

June 2008 is an anniversary for Mormons: in June 1978, President Spencer W. Kimball announced that he had received a revelation, “regarding the ordaining of all worthy men to the priesthood”. That is, black men would no longer be barred from ordination.

Ironically, I understand what a bar this must have been primarily from Card’s Lost Boys, which makes clear that a vital part of being the father in a Mormon family is being the family’s priest, christening and baptising his own children.

Women are still barred from this, but before June 1978 any black Mormons – and surprisingly to me, apparently there were some! – would have had to ask a white man to christen and baptise within their family. Mormon doctrine up till June 1978 was, and had been since the days of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, that described by Mark E. Petersen, an Apostle of the LDS, in an address delivered at Brigham Young University (BYU) on 27th August 1954 (Blacks and the Priesthood in the Mormon Church): “…the Lord is willing, if the Negro accepts the gospel with real, sincere faith, and is really converted, to give him the blessings of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost. if that Negro is faithful all his days, he can and will enter the celestial kingdom. He will go there as a servant, but he will get celestial glory.”

That was the Church of Latter Day Saints that Orson Scott Card was raised in. When Card went on mission to Brazil in the early 1970s (About Orson Scott Card), he did so for a church that justified banning black men from the priesthood in a number of ways from the Bible and from the Book of Mormon: “For behold, they [the sons of Cain] had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.” (2 Nephi 5:21) (Blacks and the Priesthood)

Brazil is a vastly diverse country: culturally far from the rigid segregation promoted by the LDS at that time, very far from Brigham Young High School from which Card had graduated to spend the next few years at Brigham Young University, in Orem, Utah.

Card came back from Brazil to live, study, and marry in Utah: he did not move out of the state till 1981.

In June 1978, after years of other American universities boycotting sports events if athletes from Brigham Young University were competing, with the threat looming that the LDS could lose its tax-exempt status, President Kimball declared that past Mormon prophets had promised that at some time the ban would be lifted and that God, by revelation, had shown him that the day promised had come. (Brigham Young had written, in 1854, that “When all the other children of Adam have had the privilege of receiving the Priesthood, and of coming into the kingdom of God, and of being redeemed from the four quarters of the earth, and have received their resurrection from the dead, then it will be time enough to remove the curse from Cain and his posterity.” Kimball’s claim that this had now happened was never officially challenged.)

Even after 30 years, this is still a living issue for many Mormons – both for those who left the main sect because they couldn’t accept Kimball’s revelation, and for those who stayed. It is also clear, from comments in my own journal and elsewhere, that the current official history of the Latter Day Saints plays down the past racist doctrines to a 1984-ish degree.

On 9th June, thirty years after Kimball’s revelation, Card wrote (Real faith, science unafraid):

There is no aspect of the gospel where faithful Latter-day Saints would refuse to ‘extend’ our ‘understanding’ because of new revelation — once we confirmed its genuineness for ourselves. We do no service to ourselves or others if we ever claim to know everything. What the church offers is a means by which we can each know everything that God has deemed us ready to receive so far.

On 24th July, Card wrote his call to terrorist action, in which he asserted that 12th June 1967 marked “the end of democracy in America” because the nine judges on the Supreme Court then made new law without any democratic process, striking down laws all over the US enacted by majority vote. In Utah, where Card was living then, the statutes against interracial marriage had been enforced till 1963: and even a generation later, while interracial marriages are “more widely accepted”, according to Utah State University’s program director of marriage and family therapy at the USU’s Family Life Center, they’re still “generally discouraged”. “There are three main reasons why people marry outside their race. Some do it for the shock factor, some do it to show they aren’t prejudiced and some people really just don’t see color.”

Actually, although Card’s comments about judges striking down legislation enacted by majority vote do apply very directly to the 1967 decision – they may be echoes of what Card heard from white Mormons when he was a 16-year-old at Brigham Young High School – in the 24th July essay that prompted Orson Scott Card, homophobic terrorist, against the orderly pursuit of happiness, he wasn’t writing directly against interracial marriage: he was writing directly against same-sex marriage. In that essay, Card promised he would talk “seriously and candidly” about “the state of scientific research on the causes of homosexuality”, and last Thursday, the homophobic terrorist provided what he promised: a serious, candid look at his own misunderstandings about civil rights, sexual misunderstandings, and his own bigotry.

Orson Scott Card begins by asserting that people who support the right of same-sex couples to marry rest their claims entirely on three things, which he goes on to present in typical Humpty Dumpty style (My unDumptied translation):

1. Gays have no choice whatsoever. Genes or hormones make them gay, and it is unreasonable to expect them to control or limit their behavior in any way. (No one knows what the causes of human sexual orientation are, but it’s been accepted for well over a century that there is no way to change a person’s sexual orientation.)

2. Even if there is an element of choice (or preventable environmental influence), there is no reason to ask gays to control or limit their behavior, because homosexuality causes no harm to anyone. (Even if there was a way, why should anyone want to? In decades of trying, no one has been able to show the slightest harm that results from accepting that humans have a normal range of sexual orientation that runs from exclusively lesbian/gay to exclusively straight.)

3. Because the first two points have been “scientifically proved,” it is unfair to give any kind of legal or social preference to the actions and relationships of heterosexuals. Any such preference is like telling gays to “sit in the back of the bus.” (Given the first two points, we know some people will always form long-term relationships with same-gendered partners, living together, and sometimes bringing up children together, so why should some couples be denied basic civil rights like the freedom to marry, and their children denied the legal security of married parents: this discrimination is legally identical to the discrimination that interracial couples once faced, and it is wrong.)

(Card’s use of the phrase “sit at the back of the bus” is a clear textual clue that Orson Scott Card is aware of the parallels between the LDS racial discrimination back 30 and 40 years ago, and LDS homophobic discrimination today. In Utah, same-sex marriage is prohibited by constitutional amendment: in North Carolina, where Card lives today, it is prohibited by statute.)

In Card’s essay on 9th June, he wrote:

If there are many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God that are yet to be revealed, it stands to reason that we do not know them now.
It is in the nature of the human mind to try to make sense out of the knowledge we have. We fill in the gaps and smooth out the seeming contradictions as best we can, and for a time we think we have found truth. Until we run up against the wall of evidence.

Two months later, he presents this hypothesis:

It is not unfair to give unique preference to monogamous heterosexual relationships, if that preference and those marriages benefit all of society — including homosexuals or potential homosexuals.

This hypothesis – that allowing only monogamous mixed-sex couples the legal benefits of marriage is beneficial to the whole of society – is a testable assertion. Since 1989, there are now 25 countries in the world where same-sex couples have either access to the same legal benefits as a married couple, or have the freedom to marry. (Andorra, Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and (parts of) the United States.) That is a fairly wide pool of countries to look at, and there remain 170 countries where the legal rights of marriage are restricted to mixed-sex relationships. Even if Card subtracts from the 170 all the countries where polygamous mixed-sex marriage is recognised, and the countries where some legal recognition is given to same-sex cohabiting couples, he still has a long list of societies to examine if he wanted to test his hypothesis in a scientific way.

He would have to define what he means by “marriages benefit all of society”, of course. And establish his criteria by which he would prove “benefit”. And do a fair amount of work gathering data on these societies around the world. And then a lot of work correlating the data and compensating for external influences that have nothing to do with the phenomena he is examining – for example, if one of his criteria was “homicide rates”, it would hardly be scientific of him to correlate homicide rates in Israel or South Africa with those countries’ recognition of same-sex marriage. It would be a lot of work.

And it’s not something that Orson Scott Card shows any interest in doing: or in examining the work others have done.

What Card does in this essay is no different from the kind of legerdemain he used his 2004 essay on same-sex marriage. Consistently, while he refers to scientific studies done on the causes of sexual orientation, he keeps repeating, in some form or another, that:

Science does not say that gays have no choice whatsoever.

While asserting that

We can all agree that no one can help desiring what they desire. Desires come unasked for and often from sources we do not understand.

Card argues that the desire of a human being for another of the same gender is an impulse can and should be “recognized and controlled”. He explicitly compares same-gendered sexual desire to drunk driving, to child molestation, to aggressive fighting, to schizophrenia, to heterosexual rape. And then he concludes

In other words, our society right now says that everybody but homosexuals [emphasis mine] must curb whatever innate desires are perceived, by our society, as harmful or undesirable, regardless of how natural or evolutionarily productive they might be, or how strongly they are felt.
Homosexuals alone are treated, by our politically correct society, as being somehow perpetual children, incapable of controlling their desires or limiting their expression in any way. They are regarded, by those who presume to speak for them, as less volitional than other citizens of the same age.

Card has leapt in this argument directly from asking “Does giving a legal preference to mixed-gender desires and marriages benefit the whole of society” to asserting that question has been answered – that same-gendered sexual desire is “perceived as harmful or undesirable” and that to claim that these feelings are natural/normal and legal discrimination against same-sex relationships is therefore wrong, ought to “enrage” LGB people because that means (Card says)

that of all human beings, only homosexuals cannot control their sexual behavior by conscious choices. This dogma implies that they are less than human. Yet this is precisely what the normalizers [which seems to be his new word: two weeks ago he was using "homosexual activists"] claim: “They can’t help it.”

This is the same Orson Scott Card who claimed, only weeks earlier,

The LDS faith is an experimental religion. We use the scientific method. No one is asked to rely on other people’s faith; we are expected to ask the questions ourselves, and then “prove” and “test” the answers we are given.

Card has asked the question: “Does restricting legal marriage to monogamous heterosexual relationships benefit all of society?” He has been asking this question since 2004. But far from “proving” or “testing” the answers he has been given, he hasn’t even answered his own question.

His essay of a fortnight ago merely asserted the same old same old: that as there is “no natural method by which two males or two females can create offspring in which both partners contribute genetically” and also because of the “long mammalian tradition of heterosexuality” it follows that marriage should only be allowed where “a father and a mother collaborate in rearing children that share a genetic contribution from both parents”. This essay on 7th August, claiming to examine “the state of scientific research on the causes of homosexuality”, merely repeats this premise as an unexamined postulate. Card has not offered any proof nor apparently attempted to test his hypothesis: he simply asserts the doctrine of his church.

In 1959, without the knowledge of the LDS Church authorities, Bruce R. McConkie (who was then serving in the First Council of the Seventy of the LDS Church, as he had done for 13 years) published a book called Mormon Doctrine. Publication of the book was met with “surprise and disapproval” from the then-President David O. McKay, and McKay directed two Apostles, Marion G. Romney (yes, a distant cousin of Mitt Romney) and Mark E. Petersen (the same Apostle who, five years earlier, had said at BYU that “the Negro” could enter the celestial kingdom only as a servant) reviewed the text and made a list of significant errors (McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine) None of the errors Romney and Petersen list are concerned with Mormon doctrine about black people. In 1966, a second, approved edition was republished: in 1972, McConkie was called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the LDS’s church’s central governing body, second only to the Quorum of the Presidency, in which he served till 1985.

Quotes from Mormon Doctrine, 1966 (link):

[I]n a broad sense, caste systems have their root and origin in the gospel itself, and when they operate according to the divine decree, the resultant restrictions and segregation are right and proper and have the approval of the lord. To illustrate: Cain, Ham, and the whole Negro race have been cursed with a black skin, the mark of Cain, so they can be identified as a caste apart, a people with whom the other descendants of Adam should not intermarry.” (pp. 108-106)

Though he was a rebel and an associate of Lucifer in pre-existence, …Cain managed to attain the privilege of mortal birth…. [H]e came out in open rebellion, fought God, worshiped Lucifer, and slew Abel…. as a result of his rebellion, Cain was cursed with a dark skin; he became the father of the Negroes, and those spirits who are not worthy to receive the priesthood are born through his lineage. (pp. 108-109)

“The gospel message of salvation is not carried affirmatively to them [blacks]….” (p.527)

The Negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain spiritual blessings are concerned, …but this inequality is not of man’s origin. It is the Lord’s doing, is based on his eternal laws of justice, and grows out of the lack of spiritual valiance of those concerned in their first estate [the Mormon pre-existence]. (p. 527-528, 1966)

This was the accepted doctrine of the Latter Day Saints until Kimball’s revelation in June 1978. In the essay published to coincide with the 30th anniversary of that revelation, Card wrote:

We do no service to ourselves or others if we ever claim to know everything. What the church offers is a means by which we can each know everything that God has deemed us ready to receive so far. ….. When I hear a Latter-day Saint say, “We have all the answers,” I shudder a little. Because how could we possibly have all the answers, when we haven’t even begun to think of all the questions?

How indeed?

After several hundred words of maundering though his view of “science”, Card the homophobic terrorist is back, advocating the overthrow of the US government by force and violence: “And if the normalizers have their way, and it becomes criminal to give any social or legal preference to reproductively productive patterns of marriage and family, why would any rational person give their allegiance to such a community, such a legal system, such a state or nation?”

   

2. Card’s review of the state of scientific research on the causes of sexual orientation

If you are interested in what a real methodological review of LGBT research looks like, the Scottish Parliament commissioned one in 2003.

What Orson Scott Card opts to do instead is point his readers at two articles in the neoconservative magazine Commentary: “Inventing the Homosexual” by Marjorie Rosenberg, published in 1987, and “Straight Talk about Gays”, by E.L. Pattullo, published in 1992. (Card provides links from his essay to the articles, either forgetting or not caring that the Commentary archive is subscribers-only. And, annoyingly, the articles don’t appear to be available online elsewhere, though I’ll keep looking.) He also, more practically, points his readers at the Atlantic Monthly’s cover story for June 1997, Homosexuality and Biology by Chandler Burr. All of these articles have one thing in common, besides their all three being by American writers: although Card says he wants his readers to examine current scientific thinking, he is pointing them at articles from 10 to 20 years ago.

In 1957, Dr Evelyn Hooker (cite) published research demonstrating that “expert clinical judges could not distinguish the projective test protocols of nonclinical homosexual men from a comparable group of heterosexual men, nor were there differences in adjustment ratings”. This was the first known scientific research done with any group of LGB people who were neither in prison nor inpatients at a mental hospital, but it wasn’t the last: her research was consistently validated by other investigators, and – five decades later – it is accepted as scientific fact. That the American Psychiatric Association delayed till 1973 in removing homosexuality from its list of “mental disorders”, had more to do with homophobic bigotry than scientific doubt: 25 years later, there is no reputable psychiatric association, in the US or anywhere else, that asserts anything else.

Orson Scott Card sweeps over all of the scientific research done since 1957 and declares that the APA’s decision in 1973 was just a “majority vote”, “intensely pressured and cajoled by homosexual activists”. He claims that Dr Hooker’s 1957 study was biased because she contacted the Mattachine Society, asking them to find her a group of 30 gay men as volunteers for her study (he says, quoting Marjorie Rosenberg, that the Mattachine Society was “extremely anxious to provide their most admirable members” and that Dr Hooker “removed from the sample anyone who struck her as obviously pathological”: he doesn’t say why Rosenberg, writing in the Commentary 30 years after Hooker first published her Johns Hopkins research in the Journal of Psychology and Journal of Projective Techniques, should be considered an authority on this). Card simply asserts that Dr Hooker obviously “stacked the deck”. (He does not appear to register that as a key criterion for the study was that none of the sixty men should ever have sought or undergone psychiatric treatment, it would be reasonable to reject as volunteers any men, either straight or gay, who appeared to be obviously in need of psychiatric treatment…)

Card also brings up a study from the 1960s by Laud Humphreys, published in 1970 as Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. The key point for most people about Humphreys’ research described in Tearoom Trade is that he established that about half the men who have sex with men in cruising areas (such as bathhouses, saunas, or parks) identify as heterosexual. The phenomenon of “men who have sex with men” who don’t identify as gay or bi is also by now so well-accepted that the controversy for most people around Humphreys is that he made use of very dubiously ethical means of “research” – many of his subjects were never made aware that he was questioning them with a view to publishing their responses.

What’s controversial for Card about Laud Humphreys and Tearoom Trade is that:

Using only questionnaires, and starting with his own strong bias in favor of finding even the most promiscuous and dangerous sexual activity to be normal, it is no surprise that he reached, as his conclusion, the opinion he had when he started — that the only problem was the way society reacts to homosexuality.

I find this reaction odd. I find it odd that Card brought up Tearoom Trade at all, actually. Hooker’s research is famous and frequently referenced: Humphrey’s research is not. Where did Card hear of Tearoom Trade? Why did he read it? Why is Laud Humphreys’s conviction that sex between men is normal the key fact that stuck in Card’s mind about this work, rather than any of the very relevant data about men who have sex with men but who don’t self-identify as gay/bi and who are often married, with children, leading lives of heterosexual respectability?

However, that’s none of my business. And it’s possible, of course, that it was referenced/summarised in the Rosenberg article, and Card is faking knowledge of Humphrey’s research without having either read it himself or researched the background to it. An unwise practice, but perhaps he was in a rush.

Card moves on to discuss the several theories about biological origins of sexual orientation, beginning with “the studies of twins who were adopted and raised apart, comparing identical twins, who share all the same genes; fraternal twins, who are no more alike than ordinary siblings; and non-twin siblings raised apart”.

Card doesn’t mention that the chief difficulty with any studies of identical or fraternal twins who were adopted into separate families at birth, is that there were never many of them and the present-day adoption practice of keeping siblings together means the number steadily decreases. The Minnesota University study group, which has spent over thirty years tracking down separated pairs of twins, has managed to locate less than a hundred pairs in total. All studies which reference “separated twins” are working with a group of less than 200 people, and most of them with groups far smaller than that – sometimes, depending on the criteria of the study, as few as half a dozen.

Once you’re aware of that restriction in the background, statistics such as “fraternal twins were twice as likely as ordinary siblings to both be gay, and identical twins were five times as likely. But even identical twins were both homosexual only about half the time” do not actually suggest any general conclusion when the group being studied is unlikely to be larger than 20 people – that is, the sub-group of separated twins where at least one twin identifies as gay. (But I’m perfectly willing to accept that Orson Scott Card probably is not aware of this restriction: most popularisations of “twin studies” do not mention numbers, only proportions. “Half the group” sounds so much better than “four people” when studying a group of eight. See How To Lie With Statistics, 1954, thank you Darrell Huff.) So when Card asserts that the study suggests “there is probably a genetic component, genes are certainly not the sole cause of homosexual desires” he’s probably honestly passing on his own misunderstanding of what the studies show.

He does, however, contribute his own take on “my mother made me a homosexual”: he thinks that the evidence of fraternal twins shows that “sharing the same womb is a strong contributing factor, too, so that hormones, nutrition, deficiencies or even acidity during gestation might be strong contributors”. If I gave her the acidity, would she make me one?

Card goes on to argue about “visible anatomical differences in the brains of homosexuals” not necessarily proving that being gay is innate, because “the brain’s physical structures can change in response to human behavior”. With all of this he’s in a bit of a muddle, since historically, the research which tends to be most helpful to homophobes arguing that homosexuality is inferior, is also research which was trying to show that there are innate differences between gay men and straight men, lesbians and straight women. Now that equality for all sexual orientations is regarded as a civil rights or human rights issue, people who oppose equality must stick rigidly to the argument that sexual orientation is a choice – which means in turn that, like Card in this essay, they cannot reference in too much detail any of the more homophobic [heterosexist] “research” which purported to discover that gay men have “women’s brains” or lesbians have “male hands”. This is sad for them, but amusing for us.

The fact is, given the variety of human sexual orientation (including the large proportion of people who would never identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, but who certainly have voluntarily had sex with someone of the same gender more than once) the only way any researcher will discover any biological cause for any one sexual orientation is to carry out extensive physiological research on a very large segment of the population, so that statistically-significant numbers of people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or straight, can be compared. We’re talking numbers such as a couple of hundred thousand, or even half a million, chosen at random.

And honestly; I never can see the point. I accept that some people are unfortunate enough to be heterosexual. I fully support their right to attempt to find sexual fulfillment, if they can, with partners of their preferred gender. I don’t have to care why they became “that way”: they can’t change, and they shouldn’t have to, and we shouldn’t discriminate against them just because they’re not capable of same-gendered sexual feelings. (Sarcasm apart, the whole area of scientific research into biological “causes” for homosexuality has always struck me as fairly dubious: the numbers are too small and the researchers always seem to focus on men and to depend on the idea that their control group of straight men really are all straight. That Orson Scott Card is also resisting this area of scientific research is a perfect example of Terry Pratchett’s Cosmopolite Rule: “He was right about that, but only by accident.”)

However Orson Scott Card also leaps back to the “old science” – the research that “proved” that people become gay because of “overdominant or sexually inappropriate behavior by mothers, and hostile or distant behavior by fathers”. Though Card types this as “old science” and links this to Freud, this is also being pushed at the parents of LGB children by Exodus International/Focus on the Family: Jim Burroway says (February 2007) that at an ex-gay conference Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality, said to an audience consisting mainly of parents whose children are gay or lesbian, “We advise fathers, if you don’t hug your sons, some other man will” and Burroway reports that at those words “a very painful groan rose from the audience. ….. I looked around and saw heads shaking, couples looking at each other, and a general sense of horror filled the room.”

Card repeats his claim earlier that “this view of homosexuality” lost a political battle in the APA in 1973, and again skips over the research that only confirmed Dr Hooker’s conclusions from 1957. He claims:

No one can say now to what degree, if any, the treatment of young children — or pubescent ones — by their parents or peers might influence their self-perception and their adoption of a particular sexual identity.

Which he is quite wrong about, of course. The research he erases from history, both before 1973 and afterwards, in fact established with scientific certainty that while the treatment of young or pubescent children by their parents or their peers can influence their self-perception, can make an LGB adolescent claim to be straight, such treatment has to be literally torture to make a teenager’s sexual feelings go away (here a young gay man describes being burned on his hands and chest at Brigham Young University in 1994 to stop his sexual reactions when he looked at gay porn) … and nothing can make a teenager’s sexual feelings change orientation, as even Dr Nicolosi admits.

Having spent some stupid time trying to claim that the APA only took homosexuality off the list of mental disorders because of political campaigning by activists and a majority vote, Card reverses himself and says that he agrees that “homosexuality should not be treated as a mental illness” and praises the creativity of some LGB people (though he’s careful to say that it’s “not disproportionate”). But, he says:

there can be no serious question that homosexuality, to the degree that it cannot be overcome or outlasted, is a reproductive dysfunction. A human body that has evolved with functional organs of sexual reproduction is redirected to sexual activities that are reproductive dead ends.

It appears that he thinks this is a final, telling point. At no point has he apparently paid attention to lesbians (or gay men) having babies by any other method than by getting married to someone of the wrong gender and “fantasizing a different partner” in order to manage to mate and reproduce. Lesbians who have children by donor are apparently quite outside his ken. Also, apparently, he has no notion that these days probably even Latter Day Saints use their “functional organs of sexual reproduction” in sexual activities that will never result in reproduction: heterosexual coupling when the woman is on the Pill, or the man is using a condom, is also a reproductive dead end. (As is masturbation. And I don’t believe Card doesn’t know how to be a wanker…)

However, Card instructs his readers that scientific efforts in regard to human sexual orientation should be to identify whatever “genetic, uterine, environmental, social influences” might make children lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Because if they can be identified, Card’s sure “the incidence of this dysfunction can be minimized, and where it occurs anyway its negative effects on the individual and the rest of society can be minimized.

Card adds in his usual “pity me, I’m the victim here” style that the “normalizers” will seize upon the idea as “an attack on homosexuals, a desire to ‘commit genocide’ against the homosexual community”.

Actually, if there is a “genetic or uterine” cause, if that means that kids who are going to grow up lesbian, gay, or bisexual can be identified as fetuses, the only way to “minimize the incidence”… would be to allow abortion on demand for this “dysfunction”.

What is Orson Scott Card’s position on abortion, then? I forget. He’s an active supporter of a woman’s right to choose abortion if they discover the fetus is “dysfunctional” in some way, is he?

No?

Odd, then, that he should identify us as the people who will cry out against the “genocide”. What such a test – queerness in utero, followed by abortion – would certainly ensure would be that never again would a lesbian, gay, or bisexual child be born to a parent who would hate and abuse their own child for their sexual orientation. (One science-fiction writer, playing with the idea of a test for the gay male gene, summed it up as “All gay men under a certain age would be Catholic” – because, he surmised, only the Catholic Church would be strict enough to stick to “no abortion, not even queers”.) If the doctor who does the genetic testing has the job of telling the parents “Mum, dad, I’ve got something to tell you”, then at least the parents have several months to deal with their child coming out before the fetus, er, comes out.

   

3. The nastiest slur, the cruellest lie

Card has repeatedly asserted that “seduction, molestation or other sexual trauma” is a factor in sexual orientation – that identical twins might be more likely to be both gay because both were equally attractive to “a molester, seducer or rapist”.

Card repeats the horrific lie twice in this one essay, more strongly the second time, that “Countless homosexuals record their “awakening” to homosexuality in the form of rape, molestation or seduction; homosexuality seems to be one of the possible responses to profound trauma or sexual misdirection at a susceptible age.” And protests with annoyance that whenever this is even suggested, it is “shouted — no, screamed — down”. (Or met with a very painful groan, as Burroway describes it in his report on the Box Turtle Bulletin – Love Won Out conference run by Exodus International/Focus on the Family for the parents of lesbian and gay children.)

Card claims that “within the homosexual community” we LGB people know perfectly well that “not everybody’s introduction to homosexuality was the beautiful fulfilment of an idyllic dream”.

That’s true. My introduction to homosexuality was an article in Spare Rib in 1981. Having been introduced, I promptly and rather impolitely pretended not to know homosexuality for another two years. Also, the first time I had sex with another woman, like most adolescent “first times”, it was awkward and not particularly fulfilling and got me into a bit of an emotional mess in the long run. The theory many straight people have that two women just magically know how to make love to each other and fall into ecstasies of perfect understanding and romantic love, probably involving dildos in some way, is… well, not in my reality. Nor anyone’s reality, outside certain soft-porn/romantic novels.

I’m sorry, I have to be funny about it because it’s not funny at all. This is is straight out of Anita Bryant from thirty years ago, the story of how we are “recruiting” children: this is the motivation for Section 28 in the UK, the theory that somehow we can “promote” homosexuality. From the queer point of view, it’s a nasty slur, but easily disprovable: if Orson Scott Card were interested in finding out the truth, he could just ask around the “many homosexuals” he claims to be well-acquainted with, or he could sit down for a heart-to-heart talk with any of the several LGB people he claims still to be “close friends” with. Perhaps he did, and this was one of the occasions when he reports being “screamed down”. (I should think Janis Ian has quite a scream. If that’s what happened, I wish I’d heard it.)

I’m being funny because when I think of Orson Scott Card telling his friends and acquaintances that he knows that sexual molestation made them gay, and receiving their indignant response that no, it wasn’t so, with a smug “ah, of course you won’t admit that, it doesn’t fit the public story that supports your political agenda” – well, honestly: I want to slap his smug face. I do. I wouldn’t, because I’m not a violent person, but I want to. I especially want to when I think of the possibility that a lesbian or gay acquaintance may have opened up to Card enough to tell him about abuse in childhood, not knowing that Card was adding their experience as further “proof” that childhood abuse makes people gay.

Many children are sexually abused. (And this report here suggests that, like most extremely hierarchical and male-dominated organisations, the LDS church has a real problem upholding the testimony of an abused child – or a woman – against the claims made by a father or a husband that the victim is lying. This report suggests that the influence of LDS in state politics in Utah is one reason why Utah child protection services have been ineffective. I offer this for what it’s worth. Similar religious/political influence affected child protective services in Catholic countries….)

But no scientific research has discovered any correlation between sexual abuse in childhood or adolescence, and sexual orientation. The only group of people claiming there is such a correlation are the professionals preying on the parents of LGB children: the Exodus International/Focus on the Family “psychiatrists” who offer to attempt a “cure”.

So for us, it’s just another nasty slur: we know it’s not so, and we can show it’s not so. Indeed, if it were so, the theory is there would be no straight men nor any lesbians who could testify against male sexual abusers: simple common sense says otherwise. But for anyone interested in scientific evidence, there’s an overwhelming amount that shows no scientifically-measurable correlation between having been abused or raped as a child or adolescent, and sexual orientation as an adult.

But for the parents of lesbian, gay, or bisexual children, if they fall into the hands of the ex-gay movement, it’s a horrifyingly cruel lie. (I think of the story of Lost Boys, in which Orson Scott Card invented a fictional son named Stevie to have him fictionally raped and murdered. Was it better for Card to think of his imaginary son dead than imagine him becoming gay “because” he’d been raped? There is a curiously sympathetic portrait of a young paedophile in that novel, who angrily tells the fictional Card that he’s never molested any but girl children, he’s not a faggot!)

Card writes:

It’s perfectly all right for parents to grieve for any other loss or dysfunction a child suffers, but the reproductive dysfunction called homosexuality they must pretend to receive without a qualm — or risk severe condemnation by one of the most vocal and intolerant groups in our society.

In case you didn’t realise, by “most vocal and intolerant”, Card means LGBT activists. (He’s using his special Humpty Dumpty definition of “intolerant”, in which a same-sex couple getting married is “an act of intolerance“.)

But as for Card’s faked concern for the pain that parents of LGB children suffer, let Jim Burroway respond:

Child sexual abuse, as we well know, is an all-too-tragic reality in our society. Those who have gone through it know the pain and terrible toll that it exacts on the child, especially in his or her ability to trust another human being. And every parent of a violated son or daughter goes through a period of tremendous guilt and shame over their “failure” to protect their little boy or girl. I cannot even begin to imagine the anguish that these parents must feel.

But I saw at least one parent at Love Won Out feel that same anguish for the first time. And afterwards, I felt as if I was carrying a lead weight around in the pit of my stomach for the rest of the day. I wondered what sort of conversations would be taking place the next time these parents talked to their sons and daughters (those who were on speaking terms, anyway, as most of them were.)

And I wondered whether these parents would even believe their children when they deny having been molested. After all, they had heard the “experts” describe gays and lesbians as having been universally abused. And according to these “experts”, this made them “cautious, fearful, easily hurt, easily slighted, easily offended, self-protective” and incapable of being honest with their feelings. This is a terrible setup for dialogue and familial reconciliation. …. It’s a cruelty that these parents didn’t deserve.

Couldn’t say it better.

   

4. Human sexual orientation is a continuum, not an ONOFF state

I wondered how Orson Scott Card would deal with bisexuality, since he (apparently) managed to read Tearoom Trade without noticing the depiction of men who have sex with men without identifying as gay, but it turns out he claims that “ever since 1973″ the people he refers to as “homosexuality normalizers” have been trying to avoid the fact that so many people are bisexual. (He argues that bisexuality “might just as easily be called indeterminacy”.)

He asserts that the large number of people who come out “at the age of a normal midlife crisis” (whenever that is), when they have married and have children, is somehow “making hash” of the “doctrines of inevitability”. Because it is possible for a young lesbian or gay man to convince themselves that they should get married heterosexually (and once married, to have children) Orson Scott Card asserts that means any lesbian or gay man can do this. As in 2004, when he argued that lesbians and gay men already had the right to marry, because

Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law. And, in fact, many homosexual men have done precisely that, without any legal prejudice at all. Ditto with lesbian women. Many have married men and borne children.

In the 1970s and 1980s, and still (I regret to say) to a certain extent today, many lesbians and gay men do refuse to accept bisexuality as an identifiable sexual orientation. So do many straight people, of course. (Joss Whedon, notably, never could bring himself to identify Willow as bisexual, even though he had written her as passionately in love with both Oz and Tara.) The idea that sexual orientation is a continuum, not consisting of sharp divisions, was first mooted by Alfred Kinsey in 1948, only a handful of years before Evelyn Hooker began her ground-breaking research, and acceptance of that as normal for humans is something that Orson Scott Card is bitterly resisting all through this essay. For him to sneer at the “culture of homosexuality” for not accepting bisexuality as a normal sexual orientation is a wonderfully classic example of pot calling kettle black.

The fact is, though, that Card is right that many lesbians and gay men have told bisexual people they should “come out of the closet” and “stop fooling themselves” – not because we have a doctrine (we’re not the LDS, Card: we don’t have to have a doctrine about everything!) but because so many of us do have that experience, or know someone who has, of getting married to the wrong gender: of living with the pretence of being straight for years or decades.

I’ve never been involved with a man – certainly never been married, but between 1981 and 1983, when I thought about my sexual orientation at all, I thought “I’m bisexual” – because I knew I had sexual feelings about other girls, and I knew I was supposed to have sexual feelings about boys. I was wrong: I wasn’t bisexual. When I came out of the closet and stopped fooling myself, I knew the feelings I had told myself I was supposed to have about boys were not real. But three of my girlfriends have been bisexual. And I never tried to convince any of them otherwise. It just wasn’t on my agenda. But I’ve known people, lesbian, gay, and straight, who would say that bisexual people “just haven’t made up their minds”. (Octavia E. Butler describes such an argument in her first novel, Patternmaster, 1976, between a straight man and a bisexual woman.)

I don’t think this is an honest misunderstanding on Card’s part. After all, he claims to have close lesbian/gay friends, and it’s not as if any lesbian or gay person growing up in queer culture over the past 40 years could just have missed the culture wars about bisexuality. But not only that: if he’s been so focussed on his own internal understanding of and feelings about “homosexuality”, that he hasn’t noticed that most queer organisations now refer to “LGBT” or “GLBT” – (unless even more initials are added) – then he’s had his head up his arse so far he could lick his own tonsils.

It’s true what Card claims that out LGB people do strongly pressure other closety LGB people to come out of the closet: simply because while the closet door looks scary from the inside, it feels so good to be outside it. It’s odd that a man who claims to value truth would feel so strongly that it’s better for LGB people to spend their lives lying.

Orson Scott Card claims that the following truisms will “enrage” every homosexual reading his essay:

“The picture that emerges from a dispassionate view of the existing science, as well as the biographies of hundreds and thousands of actual heterosexuals, is that heterosexuality is not just one thing. It does not manifest itself the same way in all persons identified as heterosexuals. It does not follow one unalterable course.
Many people have heterosexual experiences or desires and fantasies in adolescence, yet grow up to be fully functional, at least for a time, in homosexual relationships.”

Oops, sorry, I reversed sexual orientations there. Made no difference, though. Far from being a “deviance from the party line”, I think most people would accept that it’s nothing but the truth, and a very obvious truth, to say that “Heterosexuals are not exactly alike, and neither is their degree of heterosexual exclusivity.” Oh, sorry, did I reverse sexual orientations again? But it makes no difference, does it? Does it?

As an active member of the LDS church, Card compares the sexual feelings that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people have, not to heterosexual sexual feelings, but to criminal behaviour, or to illness. He claims that because he has lesbian or gay “acquaintances and close friends” who are “every bit as volitional as any other people” that means they can contain and channel their sexual desires. Actually, what he says, explicitly, is that these homosexual friends and acquaintances of his are “as able as I am” to contain and channel sexual desires: make of that what you will. I’m not going to.

   

5. Where do we go from here?

In the comments thread to my last post, one fan of Orson Scott Card asked what he should do, knowing what a bigot Card was, about acquiring Card’s novels – when he now didn’t want to give Card any money, not even at the remote degree of buying a novel he’d written.

I had been aware, in a kind of distant way, that Orson Scott Card was homophobic for quite a few years before he published “Homosexual Marriage and Civilisation” and, after a few frustrating days in which so many online friends kept claiming that because he was such a really intelligent writer, his arguments were too difficult to address, I set about dissecting it to show they weren’t. That was in late February/early March 2004. I can’t remember exactly when it was I last bought a novel by Orson Scott Card straight off the bookshelves, but it was sometime in late 2004/early 2005. I stopped buying them – and I stopped for the most part reading Card – not because I detested his personal political opinions, though I do, but because a more detailed understanding of his personal politics made me begin to see how his personal political opinions were informing his fiction writing… and after a while, that made his fiction unbearable to me.

Orson Scott Card’s personal conviction, expressed in this essay and elsewhere, that a person with sexual feelings towards the same gender, can and should repress, sublimate, or at least “simply refuse to act on those desires” is horrifying to me. His depiction of characters who have successfully driven themselves into that position, denying themselves sexual fulfillment, was not unbearable to me so long as I was free to read it as the fictional depiction of a horrifying situation.

When Orson Scott Card writes contemptuously of the “doctrine” that

if you ever have a homosexual desire or are aroused by a homosexual partner, that means that you “are” a homosexual and any attempt to repress or sublimate or simply refuse to act on those desires is useless and doomed to failure no matter what you do.

and approvingly of individuals who

report that they have successfully lived heterosexual lives despite or after homosexual experiences or desires, they are dismissed by the normalizers as “victims of a repressive society” or “never really homosexual in the first place” or, of course, as liars.

then I can’t help but let this knowledge of what Orson Scott Card feels inform my feelings about what he writes as an author of fiction: I can no longer enjoy Songmaster, which once I loved, knowing now that Card didn’t see Ansset’s chemical castration and Josef’s mutilation and death as a horrific tragedy but as a perfectly reasonable narrative solution to the “problem” of a teenage boy who had just entered a consensual sexual relationship with another man.

I wouldn’t tell anyone to quit reading Orson Scott Card’s books because of Card’s bigotry. (I wouldn’t even tell people to stop buying them. A good read is a good read, and books don’t stop being good reads just because their author is a bigot.)

What I do ask is this:

Orson Scott Card is still (as far as I know) going to conventions, as a guest of honour or an attending writer. He is still running his “Literary Boot Camp”. He is still receiving awards and recognition for his writing. If he comes to a convention near you, don’t boycott the con: don’t boycott any programme items where he’s asked to speak. But stand up, and take the opportunity to ask him face-to-face about his bigotry. Challenge him. He’s convinced himself, apparently, that it’s only the “homosexual normalizers”, the “activists”, who object to his views. That even among LGB people, his claimed “close friends and well-known acquaintances” have no objection to his feelings about their right to marry.

Tell him otherwise. I gather – from all reports – that Orson Scott Card is a personable, charming man, polite to a fault, pleasant company, not someone given to homophobic abuse or violence. For years – for decades – people have let slide his personal views : the late Paul Harland said (in a personal discussion at the 1995 Worldcon) that he’d met Card, that he’d been wary at first because of Card’s known homophobia and Paul’s position as an out gay science-fiction writer, but had found Card polite and pleasant, discussing the possibility of translating Card’s stories into Dutch.

Break the silence.

One of the LGB people he claims as a “close friend” is the singer/songwriter Janis Ian: apparently in summer 2003, Orson Scott Card attended her marriage in Canada to her partner of 14 years, Patricia Snyder.

Janis Ian said: “We got married because we could. If we could have gotten married in the United States, we would have. When the opportunity to get married in Canada presented itself, we grabbed it. As a couple, we wanted the same rights and the same social recognition our heterosexual friends have. We also got married because, just like coming out, public figures need to do that to make the rest of the world aware. I think it’s important that people are made aware, because at the end of the day it’s a civil rights issue.”

Orson Scott Card responded in February 2004: “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.”

thoughts unspoken thoughts unsaid
lies of hearth and home
children broken on the bed and left to lie alone
things you talk around
scum you choke on down
come into my solitude
step on sacred ground

we were speaking
of values and violence
breaking silence – “Breaking Silence”, Janis Ian, 1993

   

Update, 11th August: 6. Why it matters

To summarise – From 15th May this year in California, same-sex couples could legally marry: a ban that the state legislature and the courts both deemed to be unconstitutional had been lifted. California is the single most populous state in the US (over 12% of the population of the US live there) and has no ban on out-of-state marriage. With Massachusetts and New York* added in, one-fifth of the population of the US can now marry legally regardless of gender or sexual orientation and have their marriages recognised by their home state regardless of the gender of their spouse. Proposition 8, to be voted on in November, will remove the right of same-sex couples to marry if it passes: but if it fails, equal marriage in California will have been established by legislature, courts, the consent of the state governor, and the will of the people. Over half a million Mormons live in California – more than in any other state in the US except Utah. (*New York State doesn’t have marriage equality, but it does recognise all legal marriages including same-sex marriages.)

On 20th June, the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wrote an official letter to Church leaders in California, which was to be read to all congregations on Sunday 29th June. That letter explicitly instructs Mormons in California to take part in political campaigning against civil marriage for same-sex couples in California:

The Church will participate with this coalition in seeking [Proposition 8]‘s passage. Local Church leaders will provide information about how you may become involved in this important cause. We ask that you do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.

Orson Scott Card was in California that Sunday, and wrote in his column for 3rd July:

We must frame our discussion in secular terms if we intend to be persuasive. No one outside our faith will listen to us unless we speak in language they understand. ….. “Gay marriage” is not bad because God forbids it. God forbids it because it is harmful for us, as a society and as individuals. We should be able to frame our arguments in completely secular terms, not as a mere tactic, but because secular evidence and logic are just as firmly in favor of providing a special protected status for permanent heterosexual pairings as our religion is. ….. From time to time over the next few months, I will use this column to address, one by one, my compelling secular arguments in favor of giving permanent heterosexual pairings a monopoly on legally recognized status in all societies.

Card’s columns on this topic must therefore be considered as part of the Mormon political campaign to deprive lesbian and gay people of a basic civil right: the freedom to marry. Card is using the voice given to him in part by the community of science-fiction readers, as a best-selling, award-winning writer, to engage in political campaigning for his church against equal civil rights for all.

If Proposition 8 fails, and same-sex marriage is legally established across the US for one-fifth of the population, then whether or not the next President of the US repeals DOMA, sooner or later some test case will reach the US Supreme Court – and there will be a repeat of the June 1967 decision that struck down the interracial marriage bans across 17 states. Card’s repeated, seemingly irrational fears that gay marriage will become “required” are actually very solid political/financial fears for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was only 11 years after the 1967 court decision striking down interracial marriage that God had to reveal to Kimball that the LDS Church ought to admit black people to full membership.

When the LDS was established in the 1830s, racial discrimination was so entrenched in the US that no one could have supposed that this aspect of church doctrine could ever become an embarrassment to Mormons, let alone a legal liability. If President Kimball had not had that revelation from God informing him that he could ditch the “Negroes can only be servants in the celestial kingdom” rule, the LDS Church – which is, thanks to tithing, possibly the wealthiest church in the world (tithing became a religious mandate in 1899 after another revelation from God to President Lorenzo Snow) – could well have lost its tax-exempt status.

What the Mormon church authorities certainly fear is that, within a generation, a President of the Latter Day Saints will have to hope he receives another conveniently-timed revelation from God that the LDS does not need to keep up the homophobic discrimination if that means losing LDS tax-exempt status. If Proposition 8 fails, they have lost that fight in California.

What Orson Scott Card fears, only he can say: but he is certainly trying to present his religious beliefs against same-sex marriage in a secular format, in the hope that these “arguments” will prove useful to the Mormons who have volunteered to promote Proposition 8 from door to door and by phone calls (a follow-up letter to be read on Sunday 10th August to priesthood (men) and Relief Society (women) meetings says

We invite everyone who can do so to please participate either by “walking” that is, visiting homes door to door in assigned neighborhoods, or by phoning neighbors in specific assigned neighborhoods, for three hours each of these three days [on August 16, 23 and September 6 to help generate voter support].

We can certainly hope that Proposition 8 fails. I think it stands a good chance of losing in November, after Californians have seen six months of their friends and neighbours marrying. And if it were to be voted on only among science-fiction fans, I think it would certainly lose. But it is not that constituency that Orson Scott Card is writing to convince: he is writing his hate mail to the voters of California, whom he wants to support his Church …and the Church’s tax-exempt tithes.

- More blogging by Yonmei at http://yonmei.insanejournal.com

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