Hiding behind Card isn’t doing you any good, you know. His little essay is devoid of substantive content. But if you insist, I’ll tell you why Card is wrong again.
- The Massachusetts Supreme Court is Evil Incarnate.
Card opens up with a rant about the MSC overstepping its bounds. First, as RickJay pointed out, this is a procedural point, and has absolutely no bearing on the question of whether SSM is a good idea or not. Second, Card’s comments are completely off-base. He is claiming that the MSC doesn’t have the authority to determine whether legislation is constitutional or not. This is simply false as a matter of law.
- The Law in its Majesty Forbids Rich and Poor Alike to Beg in the Streets and Sleep under Bridges
Card tries to convince us that marriage laws don’t discriminate against homosexuals. This is just silly. If laws forbidding SSM do not discriminate against homosexuals, by precisely the same logic, laws forbidding opposite-sex marriage would not discriminate against heterosexuals. After all, you’d be perfectly free to marry the same-sex partner of your choice. Ludicrous. Obviously laws forbidding SSM have a different impact on gays and lesbians than they do on heteros. That this needs to be pointed out is just sad. Moreover, Card must think it’s a good idea to push people into loveless, dysfunctional marriages, given that he apparently believes that gays and lesbians should get married to members of the opposite sex and have children. I don’t quite know how to respond to this level of idiocy, myself.
- The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Divorce
Yes, Orson, we get it already. Divorce is bad. Extremely unpleasant. Hard on the kids. However, his comparison point is with functional marriages. Of course divorce is harder on kids than living in a stable two-parent family. But the alternative to divorce is generally an unstable two-parent family, and in many cases that can be even worse than divorce. If kids are so dependent on their parents for role models, what does it do to a kid to grow up watching her parents scream at each other every night? Or subjecting each other to physical abuse? Does this lead to a healthy understanding of the appropriate way to function in a committed relationship? While it is likely that we would all be better off if people were, in general, willing to put more effort into maintaining their marriages, some divorces are certainly necessary for the emotional and even physical wellbeing of those involved.
And, of course, that divorce is bad is again irrelevant to the issue of gay marriage. If anything, social acceptance of homosexuality will in general lead to fewer gays and lesbians entering hetero marriages that break down because they are simply incapable of forming the requisite sort of emotional bond with their opposite-sex spouse, and hence to fewer divorces.
- Orson Scott Card Doesn’t Understand Evolution
Apparently Mr. Card is under the impression that, absent rigid adherence to a strict social norm of lifelong monogamous marriages, all men will do their best to fuck every woman they see, and all women will refuse to mate with anyone who isn’t rich. Aside from the irony of a Mormon going on about how men need to be compelled to be monogamous (not to mention the oddness of penalizing gay guys for the promiscuity of straight guys), he just plain doesn’t understand what’s going on here. “Civilization” doesn’t suppress evolutionary impulses (much). Rather, it’s built upon them. While men do indeed have more promiscuous tendencies than women, they also are interested in committed relationships. “Civilization”, he says, gives us better odds at reproductive success than “nature”. This is simply ignorant. Civilization is itself natural (show me a human population that doesn’t have complex social arrangements for long-term arrangements, and I’ll show you the figment of your imagination), and it’s rather less than obvious that population growth rates are correlated with degree of civilization in any event. And even if it were, what’s so great about high population growth? People are going to have sex with each other, and hence children, any which way you organize society. When the human species is disappearing from the planet because of low birth rates, then maybe we should worry about this. Until then, why does it matter?
- Orson Scott Card Doesn’t Understand History Either
Mr. Card apparently believes that “family” can refer only to stable units including one man, one woman, and their biological offspring. Deviations from this norm are only “family-like” units which will inevitably result in children whose behaviour will be uniformly anti-social. Okay, perhaps he’s not being quite so sweeping, but that’s certainly the trend of his argument. And it rather ridiculously ignores the fact that throughout history, societies have functioned perfectly well with a vast, vast array of family configurations. While he’s quite right in preferring stable families for the upbringing of children, there’s no evidence whatsoever that stable families involving unusual configurations do any worse at raising children than stable families with one male parent and one female parent, and plenty of evidence that stable but unusually configured families do a lot better at raising children than unstable but conventionally configured families do. Stability is the key, not the gender ratio of the parents.
- Homosexual Marriage is an Act of Intolerance?
I have a hard time even comprehending what Card is trying to say here. I mean, I recognize all the words, but strung together in that order they appear to be damn near incoherent. But here’s my best shot: the Institution of Monogamous Heterosexual Marriage is Special because it’s the font of all that is Good and Right in Society. By pretending that gays can be married - which they can’t be, because Marriage is Special, and gays aren’t - the Specialness of the Institution of Marriage will be destroyed, as will the Institution itself. This is an appalling argument on a couple of levels. First, it’s simply staggeringly arrogant of him to think that gays are incapable of relationships that are worth anything. Second, he still hasn’t provided us with any possible causal mechanism whereby gays getting married is going to result in weaker marriages for straight folk. How exactly do they get weaker? A guy sees a gay couple walking out of the courthouse in tuxes, and this causes him to go home to his wife and confess that while he still loves her and the kids, and they’re all perfectly happy, he wants a divorce because those gay guys just looked so fabulous in their penguin suits? Presumably not, but where, in the name of all that’s holy, is the causal mechanism?!?
So there we have it. Nine tenths of Card’s article actually has nothing to do with SSM per se, but just goes on about how divorce is evil, and families are the bedrock of society. But since he provides no evidence for the purported superiority of his preferred family configuration (and indeed, the evidence which does exist fails to support his view), these parts of his diatribe are completely irrelevant to the question of SSM. The only part that’s actually relevant is his attempt to explain how letting gays marry will result in the destruction of marriage, but here he merely asserts that it will happen, without explaining how it possibly could. This is no more convincing than the Sauerkraut Hater.
Seriously, I think you have a right to hold an informed opinion on the subject – and you might consider, going beyond the scathing remarks, reviewing what has been said substantively here that disagrees with and contradicts what you and OSC have had to say.