Unless I’m suddenly possessed by the need to write, which happens occasionally when I’m under a lot of stress, I doubt I’ll be replying until things have calmed down.

Sorry!

Thanks for letting me know. I’ll look forward to your response.

Still chewing on your post, Jesurgislac. It’ll be mighty fun to jump back into it when I’ve figured out just where you and I disconnect. :)

Brava, Mythago. I would have put it “any couple their church or other religious organization disapproves of,” but otherwise you have stated my position much more clearly than I could have done, and faster, too.

So if the faithful do in fact argue rationally, they’re not really rational, just inventing pseudorational arguments? Again, Dan, you seem to be confusing “fundamentalism” with “religion.”

One can also hold an unshakeable religious belief (God disapproves of homosexuality) yet have the consequences of that belief subject to reason. For example, one Christian might believe that it’s not the job of the government to prevent any couple God disapproves of from marrying.

That is all. I don’t read Card anymore.

I have no idea how to respond to it, but I have a long day of work to think about it.

I believe that someone can honestly believe they “hate the sin and love the sinner”. But Orson Scott Card’s concept of “sin” includes all my sexual and romantic feelings; every time I’ve made love with someone and every time I just had good sex; every time I committed myself to someone; every time I wrote about my feelings and my joys in a positive way; every time I said something positive and helpful to another queer person who was feeling negative and down about a homophobic world; the work I’ve done as a queer activist; and even my self-respect. All of these things he hates. To argue that because he is prepared not to hate me once he has stripped me of any hope of sexual pleasure, any hope of loving someone and making a lifetime committment to that person, any ability to fight for equal rights for myself and other LGBT people, and every single scrap of self-respect, means that he really doesn’t hate me, just these sins I commit - well, to me, Dan, that reads like he hates me. Someone who insists that you disrespect yourself before they’ll love you does not love you at all.

Again, not so. If it were, then all Christians would agree on whether capital punishment is right or wrong, all Jews would agree whether homosexuality is right or wrong, etc. Of course all religions accept certain base things as true, e.g. the Nicean Creed, but beyond that, there are varying degrees of what is and isn’t “beyond criticism”.

First of all, the italics for quotes works well, so I don’t need to figure out how to do the blockquotes. Thanks.

Anyway, you are absolutely right… to a degree. Yes, they can disagree and they can argue. But this doesn’t really disprove what I said. Because religion is by definition something not rooted in rationality. It is rooted in faith. Beliefs held because of faith tend to be unshakable in the face of rational argument, even if the faithful invent ‘rational’ reasons for their faith. See Intelligent Design for another excellent example.

The problem with arguing against these ‘rational’ reasons is simple: They aren’t rational. They are faith, couched in a shroud of feeble rationality that nonetheless convinces the faithful. The only way to persuade them is to divorce them from their faith, at least with regards to the subject at hand (Homosexuality, ID, what-have-you).

Once you do that, though, chances are high you won’t need to criticize their absurd beliefs. If they stop believing that God absolutely says homosexuals are bad, then they’ll likely find it pretty easy to believe homosexuals aren’t bad.

Did any of that make sense?

Amp, I know you won’t respond any time soon, but I’m still going to reply. :)

If I’m looking at the same section as you, I still don’t see the hate. I see a very firm belief in his twisted morals. I see the same belief I see elsewhere in his work, that being civilized is somehow about restraining all of our desires and committing ourselves to confusion and misery (read: marriage). I do not agree with his morality and I do not agree with his assessment of ‘civilized’. But neither are about hate.

I’m afraid that I don’t have time to respond any more; my housemate had a baby today, and it’s a busy time here. But I’ll try to come back here and respond in more detail sometime in the next week. In the meanwhile, Dan, thank you for your civility and the concessions you’ve made. I appreciate how nice you’ve been in this thread.

That’s wonderful! I love babies. I hope all goes well. And, well, I do try to be nice. A bit condescending at times, and sometimes a bit of a smartass, but still, nice. :)

Robert:
The appropriate emotional state might well be disregard. Card doesn’t care that some gay people will be inconvenienced or hurt or frightened at having to go to jail for gay sex, because he doesn’t much care about their rights. Not caring about rights isn’t always hate-based.

This is absolutely false. He does care. He simply does not believe that people should have the right to engage in that.

Card says he’s a democrat and he’s absolutely right. He’s a conservative democrat, almost the exact ideological opposite of me. He believes strongly in society regulating everything. Including sex.

Dan, I really don’t understand how you can read that essay and not understand that Orson Scott Card hates you.

I just realized something.

I am cutting him huge amounts of slack. I am giving him the benefit of the doubt ten times over. Precisely because of what I said up there. He is the ideological opposite of me.

He believes in regulating private lives, even sex. I don’t. I believe in freedom of choice in every case so long as no one else’s identical rights are infringed.

He believes capitalism should be heavily regulated. I don’t. I have faith in the free market.

He believes in God and the afterlife and spiritual laws. I don’t. I believe that the only moral laws are the ones we discover ourselves, and when we die the only place we go is to the morgue.

He even hates Macs! I’m writing all this on a lovely little iBook G4.

… And I don’t really understand him, because of it. All of it, not just the Mac part.

Yet, when discussing generic topics he shows a great clarity of thinking and an excellent understanding of the topic. So I give him the benefit of the doubt and extend my respect for him everywhere, even to the places I think he’s utterly wrong.

I believe the only reason he believes these things is because he has spent his life accumulating radically different experience than I have, and his beliefs are the logical culmination of that experience. And it would take a lifetime to give him the evidence needed to change these deep-rooted beliefs.

But I also trust him when he says that he hates the sin and loves the sinner. I believe such a stance is possible, and, not understanding him and respecting him as I do, I trust that he truly maintains that stance.

And thus far, I still don’t see the hate.

Well, yes. To me, a lesbian, Orson Scott Card’s hatred of gay people reeks from every page of that essay. You don’t write an essay like this lying piece of bigotry (as I see it referred to above) unless you loathe LGBTQ people. Passing references to gay friends he claims to have (he may know them, but I doubt if they class him as one of their friends) asserting that their relationship is “playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes”, the hateful claim that any child who doesn’t conform to gender norms is bullied into being gay, the truly repulsive claim that many gay people were raped into being gay - Dan, I really don’t understand how you can read that essay and not understand that Orson Scott Card hates you.

You and Dan are the only ones who have used hate-filled, everyone else has used hateful (just did a search of this thread).

Also, the difference between hating someone and thinking so little of them that you think that their suffering is not really worth including in your considerations seems much smaller than the difference between hating someone and actually not hating them.

It’s hateful, but not necessarily hate-filled. I don’t have to hate hippies to think that maybe it’s a good idea to throw a hippie in jail every once in a while so that the rest of them think about putting away the tie-dyed shirt and taking a bath before they go downtown. That might be a hateful act of the police power, but it isn’t motivated by hate; it’s motivated by a policy preference to not have the downtown smelling like patchouli.

The appropriate emotional state might well be disregard. Card doesn’t care that some gay people will be inconvenienced or hurt or frightened at having to go to jail for gay sex, because he doesn’t much care about their rights. Not caring about rights isn’t always hate-based.

I had never heard of the 1990 essay before reading your post today; the homophobic Myths employed by Card, which I criticized, were all from the 2004 essay on SSM. But now that you’ve introduced me to his 1990 essay, let me point out that in that essay he calls for retaining laws making it illegal to have gay sex, and throwing the occasional queer person in prison just to set an example.

If advocating “set an example by throwing some gays in prison” policy doesn’t qualify as hateful, what does?

I’m afraid that I don’t have time to respond any more; my housemate had a baby today, and it’s a busy time here. But I’ll try to come back here and respond in more detail sometime in the next week. In the meanwhile, Dan, thank you for your civility and the concessions you’ve made. I appreciate how nice you’ve been in this thread.

Again, not so. If it were, then all Christians would agree on whether capital punishment is right or wrong, all Jews would agree whether homosexuality is right or wrong, etc. Of course all religions accept certain base things as true, e.g. the Nicean Creed, but beyond that, there are varying degrees of what is and isn’t “beyond criticism”.

Assuming that basic moral values are beyond question and rationality, whether or not they come from God, is a cop-out. (cf: Job.)

I didn’t exactly say that. I believe very, very strongly in objective morality. I believe that moral values must be held to rational criticism. But moral values rooted in religion are, by their very nature, above criticism. There may be some leeway for interpretation, but there will always be a core set of values that the religion holds as truth. The only way to convince a religious man that his values are fundamentally wrong is to convince him that his religion is wrong. This is a thousand times more difficult and complicated than discussing right and wrong outside a religious framework.

I definitely think that my view of religion and morality colors my acceptance of Card’s views.

And it’s definitely possible my admiration for the man is twisting my argument. Looking back, I certainly see me doing a lot of backpedaling.

I actually found this post while looking through a lot of anti-Card writing that is plastered across the web. Along the same lines as the poster that claimed his writing is full of pedophilic themes and sadism. And I had worked myself into a lather at the extremes people were going to, and the vitriol that seemed to utterly dwarf any ‘hate’ he had ever put forth. So I came in here guns blazing, and pretty much made a fool of myself.

My apologies, Amp. Thanks again for such a civil and thought-provoking place.

… That was a lot longer than I planned. I’ll check back in later.