Oh, Dear. Orson's Off His Meds

I like Orson Scott Card as a fiction writer. I do. He gave great advice to aspiring SF authors (well, aside from his uptight Mormon insistence that caffeine will make you a drugged-out hack, but that was only a paragraph and easily skipped). But when he babbles about things not pertaining to fiction, he's an utter ass:

You really must see the absolutely unhinged claims he makes about gay marriage in an article in the Mormon Times, wherein he calls for outright revolution if the government allows gays to get married.

Like this:

Marriage, to be worth preserving, needs to mean not just something, but everything.

Faithful sexual monogamy, persistence until death, male protection and providence for wife and children, female loyalty to children and husband, and parental discretion in child-rearing.

If government is going to meddle in this, it had better be to support marriage in general while providing protection for those caught in truly destructive marriages.

Because when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary.

And this:

[snip]

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

I don't think this is merely an artifact of an uptight Mormon upbringing. It sounds to me like someone's been hitting the teabags a little too heavily lately. Oh, and lacing them with hallucinogens. What was that about not doing drugs, Orson? Cuz rightwing hysteria's a pretty potent psychedelic, there, buddy. You might want to wean yourself off before you end up stripped naked and shooting at cops.

That would just be a bad end to an illustrious career.