Orson Scott Card was one of my favorite novelists in high school, and I still fondly return to a number of favorites by him including Enchantment and Ender’s Game. These novels, which I discovered around the same time I started devouring Neil Gaiman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed the way I thought about the fantasy genre from lame, badly-written Tolkien rip-offs to something fascinating, inventive, and unique.
I’m very disappointed to find out today via America Blog that not only is Orson Scott Card a Mormon– a group I’m increasingly skeptical of post-this video (though admittedly it was put out not by the Mormons but by another group of Christians and is denounced by the Mormon church) and post-Prop 8– but a Mormon who actually is a rampant, aggressive homophobe who is a top leader in the National Organization for Marriage. Orson Scott Card apparently thinks that because the government does not share their anti-equal marriage anti-gay sentiments it is actually, full-on the “enemy” of good homosexual-hating Mormons everywhere who should change governments “by any means necessary.”
Suddenly I’m thinking Orson Scott Card’s fiction is so good because he’s living in a fantasy world, and a very dangerous, deluded one.
For shame.