Did infamous Ender’s Game author and producer Orson Scott Card secretly quit NOM, the National Organization For Marriage? Was he asked to leave after he admitted that the fight against marriage equality is now “moot”?
Card has “quietly stepped down from the board of the National Organization for Marriage, a group devoted to battling same-sex marriage, which he had joined in 2009,” according to Entertainment Weekly’s Josh Rottenberg.
Card has come under intense fire for his [positions on same-sex marriage and for his activism against equality.
The LGBT group Geek OUT has been successful in drawing attention to Card’s positions with their request to equality supporters to boycott the film Ender’s Game, which Scott produced. Scott wrote the original book by the same name and has amassed a fortune from the empire he created surrounding it.
GLAAD notes that Card has suggested “married heterosexuals should work to overthrow a government that has marriage equality,” said “gay people’s marriages ‘strike a death blow’ against straight people’s unions,” and suggested that “gays are innately unhappy and that many were raped, molested, or abused into being.”
In 2009, Card told Salon, “I find the comparison between civil rights based on race and supposed new rights being granted for what amounts to deviant behavior to be really kind of ridiculous. There is no comparison. A black as a person does not by being black harm anyone. Gay rights is a collective delusion that’s being attempted. And the idea of ‘gay marriage’ — it’s hard to find a ridiculous enough comparison.”
And that’s just a small sample.
By the way, unlike most credible non-profits, the Board at NOM is not listed on their website at all — in fact currently there is no “about us” page listing the organization’s leaders at all on NOM’s website.
Over at Think Progress, Alyssa Rosenberg offers this thought:
Card’s put in years of work on the anti-gay agenda, and just because his side lost doesn’t mean he hasn’t inflicted quite a bit of damage along the way. Getting Card to quit NOM doesn’t undo that damage, and his decision comes at a point where his ability to affect policy is on the downswing. Maybe the best that can be said for all of this is that it’s the end of an era, a moment when views like Card’s are passing into the rubbish heap, where they’ll lie along with ideas like phrenology and the belief is that the earth is flat. It’s not exactly a victory for the power of Hollywood’s content to influence social change, but least Hollywood money can still have good effects, sometimes.
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Image of Orson Scott Card by Nihonjoe via Wikipedia