So it’s no surprise that one comment thread praising Card’s dismissal quickly devolved into a minor meditation about “fatal peanut allergies” and those dreadful right-wingers who don’t believe in such things.

Of which I am one. These “allergies” are a mostly white upper-class affectation and kill only about 30 people a year”€”maybe“€”in the United States.

But progressives always focus intently on the “rights” of a tiny, vocal minority, like the fruits and the nuts. Hence their myopic and dangerous “if it saves one life” worldview. These spindly beta males all secretly see themselves as righteous macho caped crusaders, rescuing the world whether it needs it or not. No wonder they view Card as kryptonite.

Most amusing are those who condemn Orson Scott Card for writing that if those darned gays got too uppity about their so-called rights, he would personally work to “overthrow the government.”

That’s not quite what he said”€”befitting a writer of speculative fiction, he merely mused that some fed-up Americans might do so in some dystopian future but stupidly didn’t use quotation marks“€”so what?

I thought left-wingers, straight and gay, loved revolution. How many Sex Pistols records do these people own? Hell, how many Beatles albums?

Aren’t these the same folks who’ve turned actual domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn into Establishment scions?

You know the answer:

“Oh, but that’s different.”

And never mind that the same 1990 essay held up today as evidence of Card’s “homophobia” was condemned as “pro-gay” by some of his fellow Mormons at the time. Listen as a very different writer, George Jonas, recalls the campaign to decriminalize homosexual acts in the 1970s:

Back then, the liberal position was that homosexuality wasn’t a sin but an illness, and while making a sin a crime was one thing, making an illness a crime was like recommending jail for someone with gallstones….

Some of the arguments used to push for decriminalization were as politically incorrect as the moral and religious injunctions offered for retention.

Comic books used to advertise “magic decoder rings” in their back pages. If only liberals would issue similar gadgets so we could keep up with their mercurial McCarthyite moods.

Me? I’m holding out for my very own Fortress of Solitude.