Dissecting Orson Scott Card, part 1

by Yonmei

This post was originally written for my livejournal, and posted there on 2nd March 2004. My livejournal has since been suspended, and the post is no longer available. This series will continue: there are four more parts.
—
It’s been claimed elsewhere that because Orson Scott Card is “a really intelligent writer”, his arguments are difficult to address. This is not so: Card is intelligent, but in his lying piece of bigotry ‘Civilization’, he’s not using his intelligence so much as his ability to lie: to create a fiction. Let’s begin with his opening statement:

A little dialogue from Lewis Carroll: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

This is a very famous quote from possibly one of the most-read pieces of literature in the world. OSC uses it knowing it will be familiar to all, and letting it lead in to his next statement:

The Massachusetts Supreme Court has not yet declared that “day” shall now be construed to include that which was formerly known as “night,” but it might as well.

In fact, this is both so and not so, rather like Humpty Dumpty’s statement. It’s true that a word can mean whatever you give it to mean: Orson Scott Card can declare that bugger means an intelligent ant-descended lifeform, and given the context, we will all believe him. And “day” is popularly used to mean both the period of daylight, and the 24-hour period which includes both daylight and night-time.

By declaring that homosexual couples are denied their constitutional rights by being forbidden to “marry,” it is treading on the same ground.

Here we come to the first flat lie. OSC has set this up by linking the Humpty Dumpty quote with a claim that is half-true and half not-true, and declares from that the declaration made by the court in Massachusetts that gay people have the same rights as straight people is of the same order. He wants you to read this from the familiarity of Humpty Dumpty to the easy paradox of “day is night”, swallowing his first hook because it looks superficially the same as the first two unlethal pieces of bait. (I had an online copy of the US Constitution and the Massachusetts Constitution beside me as I write.)

Do you want to know whose constitutional rights are being violated? Everybody’s. Because no constitution in the United States has ever granted the courts the right to make vast, sweeping changes in the law to reform society.

Second lie, plus a twist. The US Constitution does in fact grant courts the power to make changes in the law. See Articles III and IV. So when OSC claims the courts don’t have a right to make changes in the law, he’s lying. When he claims he only means “vast sweeping” changes, of the sort that “reform society”, he’s twisting. Who gets to decide whether or not these laws are “vast and sweeping”? Exactly how “vast” or how “sweeping” must a law be before OSC claims it falls out of the range of the courts? These adjectives are not to be found in the US Constitution, either, nor in the Massachusetts Constitution.

Regardless of their opinion of homosexual “marriage,” every American who believes in democracy should be outraged that any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social innovation without recourse to democratic process.

There are a bunch of twists in this paragraph. The primary key is the word “dictate”, though. What OSC is claiming is that same-sex marriage is being dictated – enforced on all. This is patently not so: no one except those who want to marry someone of the same sex is being compelled to do so. What the courts in Massachusetts have done is to declare that gay people are included under Article 1 of the constitution of Massachusetts: “Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin.” What is being granted is access to a right: the right of marriage. No one is being forced into entering a marriage not of their choice.

And we all know the course this thing will follow. Anyone who opposes this edict will be branded a bigot; any schoolchild who questions the legitimacy of homosexual marriage will be expelled for “hate speech.” The fanatical Left will insist that anyone who upholds the fundamental meaning that marriage has always had, everywhere, until this generation, is a “homophobe” and therefore mentally ill.

Basically, this paragraph is a tirade of lies preceded by the classic rhetorical device of “And as we all know this to be true…” Tests have shown that people are more likely accept any statement, however unlikely, if it is preceded with “As we already know”. He claims that “anyone who opposes this edict” (note use of ‘edict’, as if it were something being imposed on all, rather than access to a right that will be used by some) will be “branded a bigot”: thus lumping together those who do oppose same-sex marriage out of bigotry, like OSC himself, with those who oppose it out of ignorance or thoughtlessness: and lumping those who use hate speech deliberately with those who speak ignorantly or carelessly. Note also the lie that a schoolchild who “questions the legitimacy” of a same-sex marriage can be “expelled for hate speech”. Further, he uses the classic rightist trick of lumping everyone to the left of George W. Bush together as “the fanatically left”, implying there is a monolithic group opposed to diversity (when in fact “the left”, insofar as it exists as a definable group, is far more varied than “the right”). And finally, I would like you to note the claim tucked into the end of the paragraph: “the fundamental meaning that marriage has always had, everywhere“. There is no such fundamental meaning that marriage has always had, at all times and in all places: OSC is either lying or uninformed. (I am honestly not sure which, in this instance.)

Which is the modern Jacobin equivalent of crying, “Off with their heads!”

And again, another neat little rhetorical trick, meaningless in itself but useful indicating the kind of thing OSC intends to do: he uses “Jacobin” as a reference to the French Revolution reformers of 1792 (who introduced, among other things, such radical ideas as divorce instigated by women, and the right for all children to inherit their parents property, not just the oldest son getting the lot), and does a double-reference to the guillotine and to the Queen in Alice in Wonderland. (He may or may not be aware that the conversation with Humpty Dumpty quoted at the beginning of the essay actually occurs in Through the Looking-glass, but I assume he knows enough about his audience to know that most of them won’t be sure of it.)

We will once again be performing a potentially devastating social experiment on ourselves without any attempt to predict the consequences and find out if the American people actually want them.

This too is a clever but deliberately misleading historical reference. Prohibition, the “Noble Experiment”, was the first and so far the only amendment to the US Constitution that removed a right from US citizens. (All previous Amendments, and all following Amendments, had secured rights to the American people: Prohibition uniquely went against that trend.) It is now generally agreed that Prohibition was a mistake. OSC wants the reader to associate gay marriages with Prohibition – to believe that legalizing same-sex marriage would be the same kind of “Noble Experiment” as was tried with legally prohibiting alcohol in the US. What he is hoping the reader will not notice is that in fact the proposed Amendment banning same-sex marriage is of the same kind as Prohibition: like the famous 18th Amendment, it too removes a right from US citizens as a matter of Constitutional principle – a right which, moreover, many US citizens have clearly demonstrated they wish for, and which does no harm to any other US citizens.

But anyone who has any understanding of how America — or any civilization — works, of the forces already at play, will realize that this new diktat of the courts will not have any of the intended effects, while the unintended effects are likely to be devastating.

Again Card uses the trick of opening the paragraph with a “but, as everyone knows” statement, with a carrot and stick formulation: he flatters his readers with the assumption that of course they understand how civilisation works, while threatening them subtly that if they disagree with him, or don’t see what he’s getting at with his wild claims, it must be because they don’t understand “how civilisation works”. (And again, he uses language like “the diktat of the courts”, pretending that same-sex marriage is now to be forced on everyone, rather than the plain truth: it’s a right that should be available to all.) But let’s look at the other thing he’s doing in this paragraph. He’s making a claim that same-sex marriage will have “intended effects” and “unintended effects”. He claims that allowing same-sex marriages won’t have the intended effects. This is a flat lie. The intended effect of allowing same-sex marriages is, straightforwardly, that same-sex couples shall be able to get legally married, and thus have access, just as mixed-sex couples who get married do, to the thousand-plus federal benefits and the many state benefits of being married, along with the package of legal rights, responsibilities, and obligations that go along with marriage. That’s what it is and that’s all it is: it is possible that same-sex married couples won’t be permitted the benefits, rights, responsibilities, and obligations, but if not, that won’t be because they were allowed to get married: it will be because they were blocked from getting their full rights by the courts or by a constitutional amendment. OSC is lying, not for the first time, nor for the last. What OSC claims are “unintended effects” is a fairly wide-ranging pack of garbage and lies, and I’ll deal with it at more length as OSC explains further on what he means.

Marriage Is Already Open to Everyone. In the first place, no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

The famous example of a lesbian and a gay man marrying each other, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, worked splendidly… as an open relationship. Vita had girlfriends, Harold had boyfriends. It worked for them, though not necessarily for the others they got involved with, but I am certain that OSC is not advocating here that a lesbian and a gay man should get married to each other and then have affairs on the side: elsewhere he has advocated monogamy and faithfulness to a marital partner. Which means, when he argues that lesbians and gay men ought to get married to people of the opposite sex, that they ought to live celibate and/or unhappy lives, having sex only with someone for whom they cannot care for sexually. This may indeed work for people with low sex drives. In the Memory of Earth pentology OSC describes such a marriage: a (presumably) straight woman who doesn’t care much about sex, and a definitely gay man who has tended to live a life without much sex because in the city they come from gay men are at high risk from being beaten to death, and he’s suppressed his sexual desires in consequence. The two of them marry because they both want the status that comes in their small group of being married and of having children, and they have no other option but each other. In the novels, I read this as a sad but (under the circumstances) horribly realistic reaction to a very strained set of circumstances. That OSC is urging this here as a good thing either says that he himself has a very low sex drive and believes that most other people do, or that he doesn’t care how unhappy this would make most people; and I believe the latter. Any talk of what a society’s moral paradigms are is bound to result in turning up more exceptions than examples of people following the “rules”. But very broadly, in both British/US culture for the past couple of hundred years, the dominant cultural belief about marriage is that it is, or ought to be, a lifelong partnership between two people who love each other as adult sexual beings. The idea of a “celibate marriage”, or a “marriage of convenience”, or an “arranged marriage” are all rather ‘off’ the basic cultural paradigm. OSC doesn’t want you to think about this, but it’s a fact (look at the success of the “Marriage is love” meme, though look also at the number of people, including myself, who reacted against reducing marriage to only love).

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.

Indeed they have, OSC. And I can offer many stories from both sides about the unhappiness of such a relationship. Either OSC is arguing here that gay men should get married to women and have sex on the side with other men, or he is arguing that gay men ought not to expect to have happy sex lives at all. (What he is also arguing is that women who marry gay men also ought not expect to have a good sex life or ought to expect to have affairs on the side either with other men or with women.)

Ditto with lesbian women. Many have married men and borne children. And while a fair number of such marriages in recent years have ended in divorce, there are many that have not.

Often because such partnerships were entered into on the understanding that this would be an open relationship. Or else because both partners ended up accepting that it would be an open relationship. Or sometimes because two people with very low sex drives ended up being happy with each other. But the argument that people ought not to have a happy marital sex life seems to me to be profoundly inhumanly wrong. (This is, of course, only my opinion. I concede that if you are of the opinion that sex doesn’t matter much, or ought not to be enjoyed for the sake of it, this may not strike you as very outrageous.)

So it is a flat lie to say that homosexuals are deprived of any civil right pertaining to marriage. To get those civil rights, all homosexuals have to do is find someone of the opposite sex willing to join them in marriage.

This sums up OSC’s argument: he’s saying that having a happy sex life inside marriage is simply not that important, and by sleight of hand he’s avoiding the issue that in our culture, having a happy sex life inside marriage has indeed been considered important for quite some time (I’m reluctant to specify how long, because when this idea started is very much open to argument).

In order to claim that they are deprived, you have to change the meaning of “marriage” to include a relationship that it has never included before this generation, anywhere on earth.

This is where I am unsure whether Card is lying or is ignorant. Because the fact is that same-sex marriage has indeed existed: John Boswell’s Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe offers examples in the European tradition. Other cultures, including several Native American cultures, have other examples. OSC could of course simply claim that none of these were “marriages”. But this seems to me to be culturally imperialist: if within the context of a culture, a relationship is treated as if it were marriage, the fact that OSC, a product of his culture, would not recognise it as a marriage, does not make it not marriage. But it’s entirely possible that OSC is simply ignorant of any same-sex marriage traditions in any cultures: I don’t suppose such things were taught in Mormon-friendly schools.

Just because homosexual partners wish to be called “married” and wish to force everyone else around them to regard them as “married,” does not mean that their Humpty-Dumpty-ish wish should be granted at the expense of the common language, democratic process, and the facts of human social organization.

First of all, these are two separate issues. If two people wish to call their relationship marriage, this is a matter of the common language, which is subject to collective control. It’s not controlled by any individual, whether OSC or a gay pairing. If it becomes socially acceptable to call a same-sex pairing marriage, then the common language is not being misused: it may be changing in response to changing social circumstances, but that’s what language does. Similiarly, the “facts of human social organisation” are not being over-ruled: same-sex relationships are part of those facts. It is OSC who is trying to ignore the facts of human social organisation. (You’ll note that I’ve said nothing about the democratic process. This is because I’m going to deal with it in the second issue.) But note also OSC’s rhetorical trick in conflating the way language works and the facts of human social organisation with the nonsense-character quoted in his opening statement. Moving on to OSC’s claim that a gay couple “wish to force everyone else around them to regard them as ‘married’” (emphasis mine): This is a conflation of three different kinds of belief into one. a) The belief that same-sex marriages are legally valid; b) The belief that same-sex legal marriages exist; c) The belief that same-sex marriages are “true” marriages. Belief (a) is dependent on a court’s decision. If a court with authority to rule on the validity of marriages rules that a marriage certificate issued to a same-sex couple is a legally valid certificate, then so it is. That is a function of the courts. You may then challenge a court’s decision all the way up to whatever the supreme court in this matter is, but a legal decision is binding on legal rights. If OSC is employing a gay man who has a legal marriage to another man, he would be “forced” to regard this as a legal marriage for all employee benefits pertaining to spouse. This is not, though OSC appears to be trying to claim that it is, a overriding of the democratic process: it is a given function of the law to assert the rights of the individual in the face of collective prejudice. It is a required concommitant of democracy, and acknowledged as such formally in the US Constitution. Belief (b) is consequent on belief (a). If same-sex marriages legally exist, OSC is rather in the same position as Michael Moore is with regard to George W. Bush. OSC may believe it’s wrong that same-sex marriages are not legal: Moore may believe it’s wrong that Bush should be legally President of the United States. Both may have severe doubts about the validity of the process that led to this: both may be angry, upset, outraged. But that same-sex legal marriages exist in the US is (right now) a fact, just as it’s a fact that (right now) George W. Bush is the POTUS. And though everyone has a right to complain about the facts, they are forced to accept that the facts exist by reality, not by the courts. Belief (c) is the issue of freedom of belief. OSC is free to believe that same-sex marriage is not true marriage. He need not change his belief, no more than Moore need change his belief that Bush was not legally elected President, because the Supreme Court says so or because facts are facts. OSC and Moore are both perfectly free to publicly state their opinion and to assert it in the face of force (a) and consequence (b). In claiming that same-sex couples are “forcing” others to accept their relationship as marriage, OSC is carefully ignoring the difference between (a), (b), and (c).

However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were.

Here OSC is changing the issue, and doing it with such speed that a careless reader may not notice. Marriage is two things: it’s a legal status, and it’s a religious status. Again, let me point you at (a), (b), and (c) above. A marriage may or may not be a “true” marriage – that’s an issue for (c). A marriage either is or isn’t a legal fact: that’s an issue for (a) and (b). What’s new in this paragraph is the assertion of societal benefit from marriage, slipped in as a contradiction. Note that OSC is claiming that there is a social benefit from all mixed-sex marriages (presumably including in Britney’s famous 55-hour marriage) but there is none from same-sex marriage. That’s quite an assertion, and one that, as we’ll see, OSC will find hard to prove without lying.

Marrying Is Hard to Do. Men and women, from childhood on, have very different biological and social imperatives. They are naturally disposed to different reproductive strategies; men are (on average) larger and stronger; the relative levels of various hormones, the difference in the rate of maturity, and many other factors make it far, far easier for women to get along with other women and men to get along with men. Men, after all, know what men like far better than women do; women know how women think and feel far better than men do. But a man and a woman come together as strangers and their natural impulses remain at odds throughout their lives, requiring constant compromise, suppression of natural desires, and an unending effort to learn how to get through the intersexual swamp.

This is the oddest couple of paragraphs of the lot. Some people have interpreted this as OSC being a closet case in denial. I don’t: I’ve run into this belief from straights before. People who think that men and women are fundamentally different in all ways also tend to think that same-sex couples have some magic ability to get along – to have good sex, to have good communication. To a certain extent I acknowledge a certain truth to this: but it’s not as extensive as a straight man groaning “What does a woman want?” might fantasise.

And yet, throughout the history of human society — even in societies that tolerated relatively open homosexuality at some stages of life — it was always expected that children would be born into and raised by families consisting of a father and mother.

Other people have pointed out the terrible irony of a Mormon making this claim: I’ll just say that this is one example of OSC making a claim for “all of human history” where we can know for certain that he is not ignorant: he’s lying. He knows this is not so, and he’s saying it anyway to make his argument.

And in those families where one or both parents were missing, usually because of death, either stepparents, adoptive parents, or society in general would step in to provide, not just nurturing, but also the appropriate role models.

Though here he’s stepped over the mark from lying to outright fantasising. There is no human society, throughout human history, where this happy fantasy has been true for all children. The concept of “appropriate role models” is as recent an idea as the concept that couples deserve a happy sex life inside marriage. OSC is dismissing the latter idea as if it never existed, but embracing the former and claiming it for a universal constant. This is pure intellectual dishonesty.

It is a demonstrated tendency — as well as the private experience of most people — that when we become parents, we immediately find ourselves acting out most of the behaviors we observed in the parent of our own sex. We have to consciously make an effort to be different from them.

It’s true that people tend to become the kind of parents they were taught to be by their parents – or that they react against their parents and do the reverse, which is the same thing inside out. In claiming that mothers have no influence on sons, and fathers have no influence on daughters, OSC is going beyond that common sense conclusion into fantasyland. Throughout this essay he’s used this technique – building on something that most people regard as true in order to add in what looks like a tiny addition but in fact is a sweeping change. (What’s ironic is that this is what he claims same-sex marriage is, and that’s what he’s complaining about.)

We also expect our spouse to behave, as a parent, in the way we have learned to expect from the experiences we had with our opposite-sex parent — that’s why so many men seem to marry women just like their mother, and so many women to marry men just like their father. It takes conscious effort to break away from this pattern.

Also true, to a certain extent, though not invariably as OSC suggests it – it’s necessary to his argument to claim that men are looking for their mothers and women are looking for their fathers.

So not only are two sexes required in order to conceive children, children also learn their sex-role expectations from the parents in their own family.

It’s also necessary for OSC’s argument that he claim that not only is this universal (women fall in love with people who remind them of their fathers, men with people who remind them of their mothers) it’s also required. And that is a big jump. Describing how most people tend to fall in love with someone who reminds them of their first relationship (with either or both of their parents) is rather different from prescribing it as a necessity. Yet OSC is blandly conflating the two, and claiming:

This is precisely what large segments of the Left would like to see break down. And if it is found to have unpleasant results, they will, as always, insist that the cure is to break down the family even further.

When people on the right start going on about the Left as anti-family, the only thing one can possibly say is “Oh, come off it.” Oh, come off it.

The War On Marriage Of course, in our current society we are two generations into the systematic destruction of the institution of marriage. In my childhood, it was rare to know someone whose parents were divorced; now, it seems almost as rare to find someone whose parents have never been divorced.

When people say things like this I tell them this story. I was living in Basingstoke: my girlfriend was over from France visiting me: Stranger and her girlfriend, Shoshanna, were over from the US visiting with us both and getting to see England/London. Shoshanna asserted that she hardly knew anyone whose parents weren’t divorced. “Mine aren’t,” I said. “Mine aren’t,” my girlfriend said. “Mine aren’t,” Stranger said. Divorce is conspicuous. But claiming it’s more common than not for people to have divorced parents is really not borne out by the facts.

And a growing number of children grow up in partial families not because of divorce, but because there never was a marriage at all.

OSC thus denies the reality of people who stay together as a couple and rear children together without marriage. He also claims (like the politicians who claimed in the 1980s that there were “pretended family units” and real ones) that there are “partial families” and “real families”. It’s important to note this, because the fact is that it’s impossible for those arguing against same-sex marriage to recognise the reality that families are not the nuclear unit that OSC dreams of. My sister’s family is a case in point: my sister has a son, and her son has a brother (same father, different mother): the two brothers meet often and play together. My sister’s boyfriend has two children by a previous marriage: they don’t live together but they do visit. Claiming this as a “partial family” is doing an injustice to all those involved: it’s an extended family, and a good one.

The damage caused to children by divorce and illegitimate birth is obvious and devastating. While apologists for the current system are quick to blame poverty resulting from “deadbeat dads” as the cause, the children themselves know this is ludicrous.

Here OSC is again using his trick of conflating two ideas at once: divorce and illegitimacy. Divorce is devastating to children. They don’t care that their parents are deeply unhappy living together – they just want their parents to stay together – forever, ideally. But this is the basic natural selfishness of childhood. Parents remain people with rights: including the right not to remain in a deeply unhappy relationship. (Note, though, that earlier in the essay OSC is arguing that people ought to enter into a deeply unhappy relationship.) Good parents will manage the divorce so that the children can continue to see both their parents, and do not involve the children in the parents’ quarrels. Bad parents will do neither. Divorce involving bad parents is even more devastating to a child: but it would be blindness to the child’s POV to claim that it is not devastating in any case. We can acknowledge that in the vast majority of cases, children do not want their parents to divorce, without claiming that children have the right to override what their parents need. (I can’t remember who I’m quoting, but: “The last thing you learn about your parents is that they’re human beings just like you. It’s the last thing you learn about them, because after that they’re human beings… just like you.”) Illegitimacy, however, is a linguistic marker. All it means is that the child’s parents weren’t married when the child was born. And that’s all it means. In some countries, illegitimacy may carry a legal status with it: it doesn’t in the UK, and I don’t believe it does in the US. In any case, as OSC ought to know, being illegitimate is only a source of devastation if the surrounding culture (or the child’s caretakers or peers) force this on the child. (My nephew is illegitimate. I can assure anyone who cares that this has never bothered him one whit, because it doesn’t bother anyone who knows him.)

There are plenty of poor families with both parents present whose children grow up knowing they are loved and having good role models from both parents.

This may look like a non-sequitur, but it’s a referral back to the “deadbeat dads” from the previous paragraph. In claiming that poverty makes no difference, OSC is going against all sociological evidence. Sure, it is possible to overcome poverty. (And given the relative wage-earning capacity of the average man and the average woman, and the costs of childcare, a family headed by a single woman is always likely to be poorer than a family headed by a woman and a man.) But what OSC is trying to claim is that Caroline Payne’s child problems will all stem from being brought up by her mother alone – none from the poverty in which Ms Payne lives.

And there are plenty of kids whose divorced parents have scads of money — but whose lives are deformed by the absence of one of their parents in their lives.

See comments on bad parents and good parents. Divorce is devastating for children: it’s more devastating if one parent is a bad parent: it’s worse if both parents are bad parents. But divorce doesn’t have to mean that a child is separated from both their parents: with goodwill and with committment (and money helps, yes) parents stay in touch with their children. Exceptions are obvious – but one important point that OSC skates over is that often it is the man who decides not to bother staying in touch with the children of his “previous” marriage. (I’ve seen a number of examples where this occurs, though I also know of a number of examples where the man has behaved as a responsible parent, with or without marriage.)

Most broken or wounded families are in that condition because of a missing father. There is substantial and growing evidence that our society’s contempt for the role of the father in the family is responsible for a massive number of “lost” children.

This is, to a certain extent, true. But one strong example of society’s “contempt for the role of the father” involves not “the left” that OSC is fulminating against, but “the right”’s opposition to any idea that fathers should get parental leave as much as mothers. OSC should ask himself – who opposes things like paternity leave? Who takes seriously the idea that men have equal responsibilities for childcare?

Only when the father became powerless or absent in the lives of huge numbers of children did we start to realize some of the things people need a father for: laying the groundwork for a sense of moral judgment; praise that is believed so that it can instill genuine self-confidence.

This is complete lying nonsense. The idea that a woman cannot provide either the groundwork for “a sense of moral judgement” or “praise that is believed” shows such extraordinary contempt for women that I wonder if he let his wife read this. What does she think of what (if she read this) she now knows he thinks of her? She can’t, apparently, praise her children to install self-confidence: she can’t provide them with the basic sense of moral judgement. That’s OSC’s job, because, according to what he’s just said, Kristen Scott Card is incapable of it.

People lacking in fundamental self-esteem don’t need gold stars passed out to everyone in their class. Chances are, they need a father who will say — and mean — “I’m proud of you.”

*ptui* Children lacking in fundamental self-esteem need a parent (or parental figure) who will say, and mean, “I’m proud of you.” Hell, anyone needs that – but it’s true that it often means more to a child coming from a parent/parental figure than anyone else. But OSC is claiming rather more than this: he’s saying that women can’t do it. That no mere woman can provide her child with a sense of fundamental self-esteem. And again I wonder: did he dare let Kristen read this?

This is an oversimplification of a very complex system. There are marriages that desperately need to be dissolved for the safety of the children, for instance, and divorced parents who do a very good job of keeping both parents closely involved in the children’s lives.

Finally some acknowledgement of basic truths, after the farrago of lies and misogyny preceding.

But you have to be in gross denial not to know that children would almost always rather have grown up with Dad and Mom in their proper places at home. Most kids would rather that, instead of divorcing, their parents would acquire the strength or maturity to stop doing the things that make the other parent want to leave.

This is also – to a certain extent – true. The problem is that earlier on OSC was arguing in favour of relationships that start out unhappily: let’s remember this. OSC is not in favour of happy marriages. He’s arguing for gay men and lesbians to marry people they don’t want to have sex with in order to gain the status of marriage.

Marriage Is Everybody’s Business. And it isn’t just the damage that divorce and out-of-wedlock births do to the children in those broken families: Your divorce hurts my kids, too.

Or so he says.

All American children grow up today in a society where they are keenly aware that marriages don’t last. At the first sign of a quarrel even in a stable marriage that is in no danger, the children fear divorce. Is this how it begins? Will I now be like my friends at school, shunted from half-family to half-family?

You know, this is actually one thing I was never afraid of. My parents fought a lot. They broke mugs. (My mum kept a supply of cracked mugs around so that she could have them to smash when she felt that way inclined.) My dad was quieter, but occasionally shouted and threw things. (Not to hit anyone. But I remember one incident where he threw the lump of cheese he was grating all the way down the kitchen.) I hated it when they fought, but I never worried that my parents were going to divorce, because I was confident that they had a good relationship – not that I put it in those words. I just noted that they fought, they yelled, they made it up, they cuddled, they were so aware of what was going on in each other’s minds that until I was five or six I thought they were telepathic (not that I put it in those words either). If OSC’s children are scared that OSC and Kristen are going to divorce, maybe instead of blaming other people, he ought to look at how he conducts his own relationships – with his children and with his wife.

This is not trivial damage. Kids thrive best in an environment that teaches them how to be adults. They need the confidence and role models that come from a stable home with father and mother in their proper places.

And yet, according to what OSC has just said, his own children (though being brought up in what OSC claims as an ideal environment) are so lacking in confidence that they respond to any parental argument with fear that their parents are going to divorce. How does this really speak of OSC/KSC’s role as parents? Why aren’t they capable of making their children believe that they have a good relationship? In any case, moving on from the difficulties OSC/KSC may be having, OSC’s claim that children can only be reared successfully in a nuclear family belies the flat evidence of thousands of years. Children are tough. Sure, children prefer (and are right to do so) the security of growing up with a secure parental background. But OSC’s claim that a woman can’t provide that is misogynistic: his claim that the only two people who can provide that are the child’s biological father with mother providing the trivial little extras (not, of course, the big important stuff) belies his claim in the earlier fantasy that societies always supply “role models”. A child brought up with two mothers or two fathers, is also being brought up with a secure parental background.

To part 2.

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

Previous: typos I have made --- Next: Dissecting Orson Scott Card, part 2

Filed under Books & Literature, Writers & Artists, feminism | Comments (17)