Will Orson Scott Card’s Anti-Gay Stance Hurt Ender’s Game’s Box Office?
In a nutshell, this is how the majority of human beings are able to process and separate entertainment from reality: Mel Gibson depicted the extremely brutal beatings of Jesus, a Jew, for Passion of the Christ, and people threw all kinds of money at him. He makes a couple of rancid comments about Jews behind the scenes, and people chastise him, sending more hatred his way than he probably had for the Jewish community in the first place. Our species moves in strange cycles.
The next probable controversy we’ll have to worry about is Orson Scott Card’s anti-gay stance impacting the box office revenue of Gavin Hood’s upcoming adaptation of Card’s Ender’s Game. Though his bias towards same-sex marriages isn’t new, it made a few headlines recently when DC announced Card would be a part of an upcoming Superman anthology, which resulted in a massive petition signing and at least one retailer refusing to sell the product. Film insiders are already backing away from him, and steps are being taken to limit the public promotions he attends for the film, just in case anyone should question him up front about it.
But how does he really feel about it? Well, he’s called homosexuality a “reproductive dysfunction,” for one, and wrote an opinion piece of the Mormon Times where he threatens any government that attempts to redefine the heterosexual version of marriage, saying he would “act to destroy that government and bring it down.” He’s also on the board of directors for the National Organization of Marriage, which is one of the major naysayers when gay marriage is brought up. But does it really matter? After all, I don’t know the personal opinions of the people who put my TV together, or the people who cook my food at restaurants that aren’t fast food chicken joints. Hell, I don’t even know how my website coworkers feel about most issues.
So no, it shouldn’t matter, but it definitely does, because people cannot separate people from their art, and have reached the point where they feel no reason to even try to do so. Some of these people are the ones who forget how often this country has voted to its highest office men who only saw marriage as a man-and-woman thing. Is the President more important than a man who wrote a seminal 1985 science fiction novel? Of course. So let’s gain a little perspective.
I don’t share even a fraction of Card’s views on homosexuality and feel that a human’s right is far more important than a citizen’s right. But that shouldn’t have any effect on how people judge the stories I write on here. (Only a strong distaste for perverse humor should do that.) So long as Card isn’t forcibly trying to shovel anti-gay propaganda into the Ender’s Game movie, which he isn’t, then there’s no reason people should avoid the big-screen adaptation. But only time and a million news stories will tell.
