Asa Butterfield in Ender's Game

I caught Ender’s Game last night and was quite surprised: The film subtly advocates for values of liberal governance. The plot centers around a gender-integrated, multicultural global military of wise children in a world with strict population control. The takeaway “lesson” is that militarism and genocide are bad, mmmkay? And yet the usual subjects”€”many who probably wouldn’t bother seeing the film anyway”€”are boycotting. Why?

Author Orson Scott Card, who by the way won’t be receiving a dime from the film’s profits, isn’t sufficiently enthusiastic about gay marriage. What else could provoke such outrage in 2013 America? 

It’s rather confusing why anyone expects Card, a Mormon living in North Carolina, to advocate for same-sex marriage. Still, he has consistently said he’s a Democrat (“as long as you define ‘Democrat’ the way it was defined in 1977”). He says he is absolutely horrified by what he called Mitt Romney’s “tough stand on immigration,” the phraseology of which clearly places him in the center-left of American politics. He’s even gone so far as to expressly articulate what anyone who has been paying attention for the last ten years intuitively knows: Same-sex marriage probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so who cares what a science-fiction writer has to say on the matter?

As it turns out, a lot of people do. 

Before we go any further, let us collectively recall that no “serious” politician (defined as someone who has an actual chance of wielding any significant power in the United States) advocates rolling back gay marriage or reenacting sodomy laws. Such sentiments are reserved for the notoriously ineffectual elements of what we can safely and non-pejoratively call “the fringe right.” So far as I’m aware, not even Rick Santorum wants to break up happily married gay couples in Massachusetts, throw them in jail for buggery, and force them into sexual-reorientation therapy. On the other hand, people are facing very real jail time for refusing to sell wedding cakes to gay couples.

Remember that quote often misattributed to Voltaire: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you are not allowed to criticize.”

Clearly, if we are to posit that homosexuals rule over us, it doesn’t compute. However, if we are to state that we are ruled by a democratic mob controlled by a media and political elite who have decided to push gay marriage as The Defining Issue of the 21st Century^TM, this is obvious to any intellectually honest individual who has been paying attention for longer than the last 15 seconds.

Let us recall that great liberal dark age, McCarthyism. Much like the current “social justice” witch hunt, McCarthyism’s engine was social ostracism and workplace blacklisting. The McCarthyite “Red Scare” bears a notable distinction from Card’s relatively idiosyncratic and increasingly anachronistic views on homosexuality. Whereas Card is part of an ever more marginalized minority (AKA, the type of group that liberals at least purport to want to protect from mob sanction), any student of history knows that the State Department was actually riddled with Stalinist spies. 

No one in the West is advocating for gay gulags (Russia is another case, but wake me from my slumber when they start imprisoning more gays than America does nonviolent drug offenders), but increasingly it’s becoming a crime to criticize homosexuals. See the case of the Los Angeles pastor arrested in London for, what else, “hate speech,” which apparently is a term meaning “speech that liberals hate.” Or punk-rock singer Fat Mike getting detained on an airplane for calling a fellow passenger a “sissy,” a word that was once a playground taunt but is apparently now a national security matter.