Orson Scott Card wrote the bestselling novel “Ender’s Game” which is a movie out this weekend. I haven’t seen it but I was thinking about it and I’ll probably get out at some point. I read the book and liked it; didn’t love it but I’m still interested.
But as I read the reviews of the movie I keep seeing the same thing over and over.
Slate Magazine began its review this way:
It’s an odd week when you follow up a review of a movie about a homophobe—Jean-Marc Vallée’s excellent Dallas Buyers Club—with a review of a movie by a homophobe, or, rather, based on a best-selling book by a very prominent one.
The Boston Globe began their review this way:
Ironically, given Orson Scott Card’s foolish and futile opposition to gay rights, his 1985 YA sci-fi novel “Ender’s Game” not only preaches tolerance, but has also given solace to countless gay kids and other outsiders struggling with loneliness and alienation. And some of the scenes in the book — an assault in the shower, for example — are frankly homoerotic. So the good his book has done helping kids cope has probably more than balanced any damage the author himself has done with his outspoken homophobia.
And let’s just all agree that Card’s view on marriage is mentioned an awful lot in the reviews. And not in a good way.
Card has also lost work because of his beliefs on marriage. Just last year he was hired to write a digital comic for Superman but the backlash against DC was so nasty and vitriolic that he lost that gig.
This is McCarthyism folks.
Interestingly, despite threats of a boycott and the nastiness from the critics, the movie is #1 at the box office, collecting $28 million. That’s good news.
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