Dissecting Orson Scott Card, part 3

by Yonmei

This post was originally written for my livejournal, and posted there on 4th March 2004. My livejournal has since been suspended, and the post is no longer available. This series will continue: there are two more parts.
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Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. I’m just going to hope that you’ve already read Parts 1 & 2 dissecting this lying piece of bigotry, but in summary: in Part 1, OSC made various claims for monogamous nuclear-family marriage, not many of which were actually true. In Part 2, OSC is arguing that civilisation stands by agonic rule over hedonic natural impulses – which is also untrue.

OSC claims the 1950s were pretty good: why doesn’t that surprise me?

America’s Anti-Family Experiment In this delicate balance, it is safe to say that beginning with a trickle in the 1950s, but becoming an overwhelming flood in the 1960s and 1970s, we took a pretty good system, and in order to solve problems that needed tweaking, we made massive, fundamental changes that have had devastating consequences.

First, it doesn’t surprise me that OSC claims that the system exists in a “delicate balance”. For him to be able to claim that the state ought to interfere with marriage, he must assert that society has a right to some influence over people’s personal lives. But, as a Mormon, a member of a minority religion, he must also assert that the state ought not to interfere in people’s personal beliefs about how they ought to live and bring up their children. The delicate balance exists as much or more in the argument that he is making than in real life.

Now huge numbers of Americans know that the schools are places where their children are indoctrinated in anti-family values. Trust is not just going — for them it’s gone.

I never went to an American school, nor do I know any children currently in the US school system (as far as I know – if anyone reading this has recent personal experience of a US public school, please share!) so I have no personal experience to be able to say directly that he’s lying about this. But I remember that the same assertion was made by pro-Section 28 campaigners in the 1980s and the 1990s, and they were certainly lying – and still lie about it today. (I cite also this discussion on an American blog, which certainly appears to suggest that the belief that public schools in the US now exist to indoctrinate children with “anti-family values” is not as widespread as OSC claims.) I think this claim is shaky at best, dishonest at worst.

Huge numbers of children are deprived of two-parent homes, because society has decided to give legal status and social acceptance to out-of-wedlock parenting and couples who break up their marriages with little regard for what is good for the children.

For reference’s sake, here’s the US Census data that OSC is quoting from: he isn’t giving a reference, because if he did, some people might follow it up and discover that he’s careful only to cite the facts that support his argument, not those that fail to back it up or contradict it. Warning: PDF document. But this paragraph is doing a number of rhetorical tricks. OSC uses the word “deprived” and a deliberately ambiguous number reference: “huge”. He makes a logical leap that doesn’t follow – that these children are not growing up in two-parent homes because there is no longer much significant social discrimination against divorce or against having children outside marriage. But in fact, there is a long history in the US (as elsewhere) of children born outside marriage, growing up without two-parent families. Matthew Crenson, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins, estimates that in 1900 there were about a thousand orphanages in the US, housing about 100 000 children. Crenson guesses that it was the public reaction to those orphanages that was responsible for the creation of the US welfare system. The difference between now and then is not that then children were not born outside marriage: it’s that in those days not only were children born outside marriage subject to legal discrimination, they might well grow up without any family at all, ever.

These included orphanages, which, Crenson points out, were misnamed. He estimates that at any given time, no more than 10 to 20 percent of the children in orphanages were actual orphans. Most had one or two living parents who were unable (usually due to poverty), unwilling, or had been deemed unfit to care for them. Many of the children had been rescued from another institution, the poorhouse, where conditions were often abysmal. “When they defined who to admit, they defined who was an orphan,” Crenson says. “The institution in effect created the clientele by its admission decisions–kids with tubercular parents, kids with poor parents, kids with dead parents.”

In short, while the one-parent family is indeed far more common now than it was then, it is more common now because more children get to grow up with at least one parent, rather than being deprived of both parents and expected to grow up in an institution. Though OSC decries it, the one parent family is a product of a rich and advanced civilisation that can afford to support a parent as she (or he) carries out the vital duties of parenthood alone. Further, OSC decries the “marriage-like” situation in which a child may in fact end up with an extended family – parents, step-parents, half-siblings, siblings-in-law. He seems to be dreaming of an idealised-1950s soap opera, where everyone lived in couples with 2.4 children and no one wanted to get divorced.

The result is a generation of children with no trust in marriage who are mating in, at best, merely “marriage-like” patterns, and bearing children with no sense of responsibility to society at large;

In fact, demonstrably, Americans have not “lost their trust in marriage” – the whole kafuffle over the gay marriage issue goes very much to prove that. If Americans had lost their trust in marriage, why would so many same-sex couples have sped to San Francisco to get married when the opportunity became open? Indeed, if Americans had lost their faith in marriage, why would so many Americans have felt that that gay marriage matters – whether taking a positive or a negative stance on the matter?

while society is trying to take on an ever greater role in caring for the children who are suffering — while doing an increasingly bad job of it.

Not so. Standards of child welfare have been rising steadily throught the 20th century. To claim that they’ve been going backwards is unrealistic: it’s more of OSC’s fantasising about an idealised 1950s.

Parents in a stable marriage are much better than schools at civilizing children. You have to be a fanatical ideologue not to recognize this as an obvious truth — in other words, you have to dumb down or radically twist the definition of “civilizing children” in order to claim that parents are not, on the whole, better at it.

Which is why OSC should acknowledge that it’s a good thing that so many children are now growing up in one-parent families instead of being warehoused in “orphanages”. You would have to be a fanatical ideologue (or else never have read either Daddy-Long-Legs or Dear Enemy, and I won’t believe that of OSC) to believe that it was better when most illegitimate children were warehoused and forgotten about.

We are so far gone down this road that it would take a wrenching, almost revolutionary social change to reverse it. And with the forces of P.C. orthodoxy insisting that the solutions to the problems they have caused is ever-larger doses of the disease, it is certain that any such revolution would be hotly contested.

The road that “we” (for this trend has occurred in the UK, too) have gone so far down is that children belong with a custodial parent – usually, not invariably, their mother. It would take a revolutionary social change to reverse this – to recreate the 19th century “orphanages” for illegitimate children, to create (perhaps) the Magdalene Houses for “fallen women”. It’s a revolutionary change that, yes, I hope never happens – I would “hotly contest it”, as OSC suggests, because I happen to think that yes, it is better for society to support parents rather than to separate children forcibly from their parents and institutionalise them. Yet this is, though OSC is blurring it with his fantasies of the 1950s that never were, what OSC is arguing for.

Now, in the midst of this tragic collapse of marriage, along comes the Massachusetts Supreme Court, attempting to redefine marriage in a way that is absurdly irrelevant to any purpose for which society needs marriage in the first place.

As OSC must know, the Massachusetts Supreme Court are not the first to decide that marriage can and should include same-sex couples. As was cited in the discussion following Part 1 [on livejournal: no longer publicly available], lexicographers have already included same-sex marriage in the dictionaries: the government of the Netherlands opened up civil marriage to same-sex couples in December 2000: many churches and synagogues have married same-sex couples in religion. But the key point in the above paragraph is not the obfustication with the claim that the Supreme Court of Massachusetts is doing something new by giving same-sex couples the right of access to civil marriage – it’s the claim that “society needs marriage” but that no relationship same-sex couples can have can be other than “absurdly irrelevant” to the needs that mixed-sex marriage fulfills.

There are families, and then there are pretended family units

Humpty Has Struck Before. We’ve already seen similar attempts at redefinition. The ideologues have demanded that we stop defining “families” as Dad, Mom, and the kids. Now any grouping of people might be called a “family.”

I would say that this is one of the most heartless statements I’d ever read, but it’s not news to me. Section 28 campaigners from the 1980s will remember well the claims that those who supported the Section made that there were “real families” and then there were “pretended family units”. Who’s excluded by OSC’s rigid definition of “family”? Well, Brigham Young’s family becomes a mere “grouping of people” (as do many other Mormon families from the years 1843 to 1890, and those that remained polygynous thereafter). The Mladeniks, according to OSC’s rigid definition, ceased to be a “family” and became a mere “grouping of people” on 11th September 2001. Many other families around the world, as well as in the US, cease to be “families”, if OSC were allowed to write the dictionaries, and become mere “groupings of people” – I’m not sure if that phrase is better or worse than the British term “pretended family unit”.

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

This claim is the most bizarre, but one that OSC repeats and expands on later on. Here, let’s just say simply that any lexicographer could tell him that he’s wrong. A word can have multiple meanings, none of which invalidate the others. (Historically, “family” simply means “household” – the etymology derives ultimately from famulus, meaning “servant”. Historically, OSC’s definition of family is simply wrong, not just rigid and heartless.)

The same thing will happen to the word marriage if the Massachusetts decision is allowed to stand, and is then enforced nationwide because of the “full faith and credit” clause in the Constitution.

As OSC has used the word family repeatedly, on his own website, we can assume that even he doesn’t believe that the word “family” has become meaningless.

Just because you give legal sanction to a homosexual couple and call their contract a “marriage” does not make it a marriage. It simply removes marriage as a legitimate word for the real thing.

Again, let’s remember that OSC isn’t even pretending to believe this claim. But let’s look at one example where a new meaning given to a word did tend to set all the other meanings of the word into the background: the word “queer”. Queer still has multiple meanings – especially when used as an adjective or a transitive verb. But as a noun, it has just one meaning, and that often (especially in the past) used disparagingly. That disparaging meaning of the word has tended to overshadow all the others. This is by no means a consistent process, nothing to do with language is, but it’s worth noting that “dyke” and “faggot” have also undergone the same overshadowing process, even though they too still have multiple valid definitions in the dictionary. The meaning that is used disparagingly tends to drive out the other meanings, in the same way as bad money drives out good. If a large number of English-speakers begin to use marriage mainly in a disparaging sense, OSC may be right in claiming that the disparaging meaning of marriage (“Who are those two blokes over there snogging?” – “Oh, it’s just another fucken marriage”) would drive out the good. I think this is unlikely: but if it occurs, writings like this column of OSC’s will have been part of the process. OSC is, in writing this piece of lying bigotry in fact working for the very result he claims to fear. Language is affected collectively – there are very few people who can claim that an individual and identifiable decision of theirs changed English – but when I do not want a word or a meaning to come into common use, I do not use it. (For example, I have about given up on getting people to stop using political correctness in a disparaging sense. But I never use it in a disparaging sense myself.)

If you declare that there is no longer any legal difference between low tide and high tide, it might stop people from publishing tide charts, but it won’t change the fact that sometimes the water is lower and sometimes it’s higher.

This reminds me of the story of King Canute. It’s often told in short form as if Canute was trying to hold back the tide. But long version of the story is that Canute was demonstrating to a flattery-ridden court that it was impossible for any mortal king to control the tides. Here OSC is trying to claim that language is rigid and has set meanings: that people who try to change language to suit common usage are being as foolish as people who think the tide can be controlled by the timetables. But in fact it’s OSC who is the courtier claiming that really and truly, if his readers try hard enough, they can hold back the tide of change – make it so that when people speak of marriage in the Netherlands they can’t use the word marriage.

Calling a homosexual contract “marriage” does not make it reproductively relevant and will not make it contribute in any meaningful way to the propagation of civilization.

Now we’re at the nub of his argument. He’s claiming two things here, and trying to run them together with similar language so that the reader won’t notice. First, that a same-sex marriage is not a marriage because it’s not “reproductively relevant”. (Which is his way of trying to avoid the point that if a same-sex couple can’t be allowed to marry because they aren’t interfertile, then neither can any other couple who know they can’t have children.) Second, he’s claiming that there is no meaningful way that a same-sex marriage can contribute to what he calls “the propagation of civilisation”. And the latter is a flat lie. According to OSC’s previous arguments, civilisation is propagated only by raising children in a civilised fashion. Accepting this as a given (I agree that it’s an important aspect of continuing civilisation, but disagree that it’s the only means by which civilisation is propagated into the next generation), then by OSC’s own argument, it’s obvious that same-sex couples can indeed “propagate civilisation” by raising children in a civilised fashion. It’s not only obvious, it’s been done: it’s accepted to such an extent that adoption societies round the world make no issues of having same-sex couples adopt children (even if, according to the legal regulations in some countries, the children are formally adopted by only one of the same-sex couple).

In fact, it will do harm.

In fact, OSC will be unable to adduce any actual facts to prove this assertion.

Nowhere near as much harm as we have already done through divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing.

OSC repeatedly links these two disparate things, probably because divorce is by its nature an end of one marriage. (It may also be the beginning of two more, but not inevitably.) He probably hopes that the reader will swallow divorce as an “attack on marriage”, and follow on to gulp down “out-of-wedlock childbearing” as if the two were connected. Easy-access no-stigma divorce is a comparitively recent thing in Northern Europe or North America: but unmarried women having children is not, and OSC knows it. What is new is the lack of stigma; but since the lack of stigma means, as I’ve pointed out earlier, that children whose parents aren’t married are now much more likely to be raised by one or both of their parents, rather than being warehoused in an institution somewhere, this ought to be regarded by OSC, if he were consistent, as a positive step. However, OSC isn’t being consistent in his claims that he wants only the best for children: he’s arguing for unhappy mixed-sex marriages being better than no marriage or same-sex marriage. That’s not the same thing, and we see here which side of the fence OSC has come down on. Since getting pregnant no longer means a woman being forced to choose between a marriage she might not want, or else complete shunning from society, and/or loss of her child forever, more women are refusing to enter marriages they know will be unhappy. This is anathema to OSC.

But it’s another nail in the coffin. Maybe the last nail, precisely because it is the most obvious and outrageous attack on what is left of marriage in America.

This is an absurdity piled on an absurdity – but keep your eye on the ball. OSC isn’t arguing in favour of marriage, as such: he’s arguing that unhappy mixed-sex marriages are more “real” than happy same-sex marriages, and far better than no marriage at all. Otherwise it would be clear to him that it’s hardly an attack on marriage to allow more people to have access to marriage.

Supporters of homosexual “marriage” dismiss warnings like mine as the predictable ranting of people who hate progress.

Actually, I don’t dismiss OSC’s essay as “predictable ranting”, though it appears from it that OSC doesn’t so much hate progress as hate reality: he envisages an ideal world that looks like the 1950s but with all the nasty bits left out. But this essay itself is a superb piece of propaganda, very well-written, covering the falseness of OSC’s reasoning and the paucity of facts with a great deal of skill.

But the Massachusetts Supreme Court has made its decision without even a cursory attempt to ascertain the social costs. The judges have taken it on faith that it will do no harm.

And reasonably so, given that same-sex marriage is not unique, and same-sex couples living together as if they were married have been around for decades. OSC has faith that same-sex marriage will do harm – but we can tell it’s faith because it’s not subject to reason or to contradiction by facts.

You can’t add a runway to an airport in America without years of carefully researched environmental impact statements. But you can radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society without political process or serious research.

Here again OSC is using a clever rhetorical trick. Adding a runway to an airport will involve immense and direct change to those who live around the airport. Increased air traffic is a known and direct result of new runways. Air traffic has known damaging effects. All of this is true. What is not true is OSC’s claim following hard upon the first assertion: that giving same-sex couples full access to the benefits, rights, and responsibilities of legal marriage will “radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society”. No such radical change has been proposed. Marriage in Massachusetts, or anywhere else in the US, will remain exactly what it was before this decision was made. The only change is that more couples will have access to marriage. Adding a runway to an airport is a significant environmental change. But allowing gay people to enter the airport and take passage on the planes isn’t. OSC is trying to conflate the two: to claim that access is identical with change.

Does OSC have gay friends?

Let me put it another way. The sex life of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn’t bothered them. That’s what tolerance looks like.

I wonder how many gay friends OSC will still have after they read this tirade? Oh well – I suppose it will help OSC find out what real tolerance looks like. But I suspect that his claim to have gay friends is really the claim of any bigot “Some of my best friends are – ” and that in fact, he has none.

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

This is utter, pernicious nonsense. Let’s pick it apart. OSC is claiming that same-sex marriage is “an act of intolerance”. This is an odd thing to say. What exactly is a same-sex couple, getting married, not tolerating? The only thing I can think of is that they are not tolerating OSC’s idea that they are not entitled to access to the same legal rights as OSC is entitled to. In short, they are being intolerant of OSC’s bigotry. OSC evidently finds this objectionable. The idea that same-sex marriage is intended, or will, “eliminate any special preference for marriage in society” has a little less absurdity. There are a thousand-plus federal benefits that married couples have access to in the US. It’s possible that the federal government could decide that even though same-sex couples have access to marriage, they don’t want them to have any of the federal benefits they’re entitled to. The only way to prevent this legally, if the US Supreme Court determined that same-sex marriages are legal, would be abolish federal benefits for marriage altogether. I think this is unlikely – I think that no American administration, no matter how viciously Christian, would dare such a far-reaching attack on marriage – providing that free elections were still an option. But I acknowledge that it’s a possibility, given the strength of the “conservative Christians” among Bush’s supporters. But if it were to come to pass, it would be as absurd to blame it on same-sex couples who wanted to marry, as it would be to blame a rape victim for wearing “revealing clothing”. OSC makes some further claim for “the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction”. But this is based on his ideas, thoroughly discredited in Part 2, that the only way for a civilisation to survive is for reproduction to take place inside a monogamous marriage.

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.

Again, I have to wonder if he’s going to have any gay friends at all once they read this, and realise (under that front of friendly “tolerance”) that OSC has been harbouring a deep-rooted contempt for their relationships as intrinsically inferior to the relationship that he has with Kristin. But perhaps they’re more tolerant than I would be.

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

Again, this is a horrible absurdity. If OSC’s friends Chris and Robin are legally able to marry, it does not affect OSC’s marriage one whit. This should be obvious to the meanest intelligence, and I suspect is obvious to OSC.

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.

I’m just revolted by this. I really hope that OSC is lying when he claims to have gay friends, because if they exist I can (unfortunately) imagine exactly what hurt and pain they’re feeling, as they realise in what contempt the man they thought was their friend held them. Friends don’t do this to each other. That’s it, I can’t stand doing this any more tonight. Part 4 will most likely appear on Friday morning

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to part 4

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