Okay, okay, so not quite “just in”, since this essay is about three years old, but I only recently discovered it.

I’ll spare you all some boring introduction and cut right to the meat of this morally condescending, self-righteous shitbag’s “argument”. Or, more accurately put, all his pre-existing, superstitious, bullshit prejudices, which he scrambles desperately to try to justify using whatever shoddy-assed “science”, fabricated “statistics”, and illogical blind leaps he can sling at everyone else like a really pissed off ape on a high-fiber diet. He blathers on absolutely forever, so I’m not going to be rebutting every single thing he says, but I’ll slice up the gist of it.

Rampant insanity tucked behind the fold…

He begins:

A little dialogue from Lewis Carroll:

You know, Lewis Carroll, social scientist.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

The Massachusetts Supreme Court has not yet declared that “day” shall now be construed to include that which was formerly known as “night,” but it might as well.

Hey, guess what: Believe it or not, words have no intrinsic meaning. Fuck, you’re an author — you should at least know simple linguistic philosophy. We apply meaning to words. It’s subjective. But whatever, it’s just a stupid little anecdote. Moving on…

Do you want to know whose constitutional rights are being violated? Everybody’s. Because no constitution in the United States has ever granted the courts the right to make vast, sweeping changes in the law to reform society.

Regardless of their opinion of homosexual “marriage,” every American who believes in democracy should be outraged that any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social innovation without recourse to democratic process.

Sweeping changes in the law? What in hell is he talking about? I really, strongly doubt that a handful of people being legally recognized as a couple, in no conflict at all with any existing laws, is “sweeping change”. Oh, heaven forbid someone have a consensual and loving relationship with someone that doesn’t affect me in any way! Lawdy, lawdy, what’s the world a-comin’ to? HOLY SHIT! SWEEPING CHANGE! SOME LESBIAN IS NOW COVERED UNDER HER PARTNER’S HEALTH INSURANCE POLICY!

And, erm, that’s kind of the fuckin’ point of civil rights — they supersede Congress, and even representational government. The point is to attempt to ensure that people can’t wield majority consent as a tool of oppression. Which is real democracy, not this “WE GET TO CONTROL EVERYONE ELSE” bullshit that we’ve been led to believe is the case.

P.S. – Social innovation BEGETS changes in the law, not the other way around, you prescriptivist tit.

And we all know the course this thing will follow. Anyone who opposes this edict will be branded a bigot; any schoolchild who questions the legitimacy of homosexual marriage will be expelled for “hate speech.” The fanatical Left will insist that anyone who upholds the fundamental meaning that marriage has always had, everywhere, until this generation, is a “homophobe” and therefore mentally ill.

No, we call you a bigot because you — without any fucking information other than your own religious beliefs or cultural superstitions — have drawn conclusions about a whole variety of person, as a class, and have decided to make judgments about their lives, to the point of wanting to control what they can and can’t do. If you need to turn your opposition’s argument into a cartoonish caricature straw-man of what it actually is in order to paint yourself some kind of incensed victim, perhaps your argument isn’t quite as strong as you’ve convinced yourself.

We will once again be performing a potentially devastating social experiment on ourselves without any attempt to predict the consequences and find out if the American people actually want them. [blah blah blah] likely to be devastating.

HOLY SWEET FUCK! MY FOURTH MARRIAGE IS TOTALLY GONNA COLLAPSE BECAUSE OF A COUPLE FAGS HAVING A SYMBOLIC FORMALITY OF THEIRS!

What was the last time, implied by your “once again”, anyway? When we let the negro drink from our fountains?

Hey, Orson — are gays the reason so many straight people keep fucking getting divorced? Where’s all this outrage over all the people — many who are proponents of oppressing gay rights — who are already on their second or third marriage? Oh, but this — loving couples joining together, fighting for the right to do so — is going to fucking DESTROY marriage. Give me a break.

Ooh, here’s where we get to the absolute hilarity of this dimshit’s paltry, moronic argument:

Marriage Is Already Open to Everyone. (These are his headers, not mine.)

In the first place, no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law. And, in fact, many homosexual men have done precisely that, without any legal prejudice at all.

That’s right — step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and grow yourself a beard. Why, yes, Orson, it’s worlds better for a person to enter into a loveless marriage with no sexual interest, just for the sake of arbitrarily being in a state of marriage. What a concise and accurate interpretation of the issue! See, all gays want is to just arbitrarily be married. It doesn’t matter at all to whom.

In order to claim that they are deprived, you have to change the meaning of “marriage” to include a relationship that it has never included before this generation, anywhere on earth.

Uh, just like when the concept was first created, heterosexuals had to change the meaning of “marriage” (creating the term is indeed change) to include a relationship that had until that point never been created. And Mormons, by the way, changed it to include one man and more than one women. Or, well, actually, that was in fact the original definition of the term, and then it was changed to mean one man and one woman. And then Mormons changed it back, or retained the original definition. Which, uh, was originally about ownership of the wife. Boy, I bet it’s a real bitch we’ve changed that element of it, huh?

What, you think marriage has existed since the beginning of the universe, pre-dating man? The term — an English term for formal, legal pair-bonding — existed since the beginning of mankind? And do you think it exists anywhere outside of humanity?

Marrying Is Hard to Do.

And yet, throughout the history of human society — even in societies that tolerated relatively open homosexuality at some stages of life — it was always expected that children would be born into and raised by families consisting of a father and mother.

[citation needed] Seriously, what? In addition to being generally historically disingenuous (for a start: DURR TRIBAL COMMUNITIES, FUCKTARD), it’s really just a huge “fuck you” to single parents in contemporary society. And ‘expected’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘better’. It’s just ‘expected’. Circumcision is expected, too, in modern America, but the health benefits are specious.

It is a demonstrated tendency — as well as the private experience of most people — that when we become parents, we immediately find ourselves acting out most of the behaviors we observed in the parent of our own sex. We have to consciously make an effort to be different from them.

This means nothing, shitall, nada, jack fuck. Just because a child picks up tendencies from one parent doesn’t mean that the absence of that parent means an absence of learned behavior. It also in no way implies that a child can’t be just as close with the parent of the opposite sex. And why is it somehow anathema for a boy to be close to and imitative of his mother or a girl to her father? And why is it so important that I pick up how to scratch my ass in the same way as my dad, anyway?

We also expect our spouse to behave, as a parent, in the way we have learned to expect from the experiences we had with our opposite-sex parent — that’s why so many men seem to marry women just like their mother, and so many women to marry men just like their father. It takes conscious effort to break away from this pattern.

So not only are two sexes required in order to conceive children, children also learn their sex-role expectations from the parents in their own family. This is precisely what large segments of the Left would like to see break down. And if it is found to have unpleasant results, they will, as always, insist that the cure is to break down the family even further.

OH NO, THE NEXT GENERATION MIGHT NOT ARBITRARILY ASSIGN GENDER TO HUMAN BEHAVIOR! Everyone buy a bomb shelter RIGHT THIS FUCKING INSTANT! BLABUAGUAUGLUGUAL! END OF THE WORLD!

So, uh, by this logic, then, do all gay men want their lovers to act like their mothers? Do all lesbians want women like their dads? If not, well, uh, gee, then this learned behavior must not be as overblown-assed important as you’re making it seem, Ors.

And ultimately, if role models are such a goddamned big deal, like, what, gay people have no friends or family members of the opposite sex to hang out with? Every gay couple moves into a vacuum environment in which there are absolutely no other influences?

The War On Marriage (OH NO! A WAR! THIS MUST BE SERIOUS!)

Of course, in our current society we are two generations into the systematic destruction of the institution of marriage. In my childhood, it was rare to know someone whose parents were divorced; now, it seems almost as rare to find someone whose parents have never been divorced.

Ah, so he is getting into divorce. But I’ll bet he’s going to be doing it in a completely moronic way that makes unfounded subjective all-enveloping absolutist statements that defy the real truth of the matter.

The damage caused to children by divorce and illegitimate birth is obvious and devastating. While apologists for the current system are quick to blame poverty resulting from “deadbeat dads” as the cause, the children themselves know this is ludicrous.

[a bunch of further sensationalist descriptions of the damage done to families by divorce, including such terms as "wounded" and "deformed", with a touch of masculist crap about how fathers aren't respected enough]

Hah, bingo! I called it, motherfuckers.

Well, I’m the product of a broken home, and I’m rather proud of it. Had my mom remained with my dad, he’d have continued to be emotionally manipulative and subjugating toward her. Their divorce was probably the best thing they could’ve done in their relationship, and only made my sister’s life and my life better.

The assessment, here, seems to be that some arbitrary and illusory damage done by the act of divorce is far worse a fate for children than, say, watching daddy come home each night to beat the living fuck out of mommy, or to see mommy talk about how much of a loser piece of shit she thinks daddy is. Thankfully, I didn’t have it nearly as bad as this — no physical violence or anything, but just a generally shitty, perhaps emotionally abusive situation with a sprig of infidelity for added taste — but there are many horrible, hostile relationships that are absolutely miserable for children, and much, much worse than having parents who no longer want to live with each other.

Marriage Is Everybody’s Business. (Jesus on a mechanical fuckin’ bull…)

And it isn’t just the damage that divorce and out-of-wedlock births do to the children in those broken families: Your divorce hurts my kids, too.

All American children grow up today in a society where they are keenly aware that marriages don’t last. At the first sign of a quarrel even in a stable marriage that is in no danger, the children fear divorce. Is this how it begins? Will I now be like my friends at school, shunted from half-family to half-family?

Wait: What? Okay, my private affairs… hurt… your life. So does my jerking to internet porn, by contributing to the demand for pornography, somehow violate your children? Fuck you.

By the way, something strikes me as just a twinge fucked up about the notion of railing against loving couples who are so passionate about being with each other that they’re fighting for the right to do so while at the same time bitching about divorce. I dunno why, but that just seems a tiny bit of a contradiction.

Monogamous marriage is by far the most effective foundation for a civilization. [...] Those who are successful in mating are the ones who will have the strongest loyalty to the social order; so the system that provides reproductive success to the largest number is the system that will be most likely to keep a civilization alive.

Monogamy depends on the vast majority of society both openly and privately obeying the rules. Since the natural reproductive strategy for males is to mate with every likely female at every opportunity, males who are not restrained by social pressure and expectations will soon devolve into a sort of Clintonesque chaos, where every man takes what he can get.

Ha-HAH! Clinton! In two thousand and fucking four. The most startling comparison Card can come up with? A former president got head from someone who wasn’t his wife. Though it should really be no surprise — after all, there are still tons of people who are walking around all surprised and outraged by a blowjob that didn’t even happen to them, that happened roughly a decade ago.

Again, and again, and again, [citation needed]. Where’s he getting this? Why is the most successful mating that which is loyal to the social order? Sounds like authoritarian, daddy-knows-best bullshit to me.

Civilization Is Rooted in Reproductive Security.

Crash goes the argument. Reproductive security is rooted in money. I mean, the richer you are, the more you can provide for your offspring. So wouldn’t it follow, then, that children of rich parents are some of the happiest and most well-balanced in the world? I mean, if all it takes are resources and male and female role models, then Paris Hilton should be, like, the most level-headed fuckin’ person in the history of mankind. Sure, maybe her parents weren’t around all the time, but, fuck, most parents aren’t around all the time.

If trust between the sexes breaks down, then males who are able will revert to the broadcast strategy of reproduction, while females will begin to compete for males who already have female mates. It is a reproductive free-for-all.

And no woman can provide for herself, of course. Not only are the only wealthy people in the world men, but only men earn any money at all. Because this is the fuckin’ 1890s, apparently.

Because civilization provides the best odds for their children to live to adulthood. So even though civilized individuals can’t pursue the most obviously pleasurable and selfish (i.e., natural) strategies for reproduction, the fact is that they are far more likely to be successful at reproduction in a civilized society — whether they personally like the rules or not.

This is logically inconsistent even within his own little idiot universe. By his logic, if one woman and one man make great parents, then two women and two men should be even better. Having more parents able to supply more attention even makes sense in reality, where, by the way, there’s no evidence at all that healthy polyamorous relationships are in any way detrimental to children.

Even if the political system changes, as long as the marriage rules remain intact, the civilization can go on.

Yes, folks, even if the next Hitler rises to power and decides to kill all the non-whites, and generally makes society a fascist, Big Brother shithole, as long as we have our marriage, the future will be our oyster!

Balancing Family and Society

[general long-winded non-sequitur about how teachers raise our children, too, and how the government needs to protect children from abusive parents, and how it's somehow society's duty to supersede parental responsibility to make sure we follow their bullshit rules]

But what if a teacher is gay? Or what if the government worker who helps the child find a better home is in a polyamorous relationship?

P.S. – Fuck you; I’m going to do my damnedest to ensure that my kids’ consciences will never be supplanted by your attempts to shoehorn in your fucking bloated-assed superego.

America’s Anti-Family Experiment

In this delicate balance, it is safe to say that beginning with a trickle in the 1950s, but becoming an overwhelming flood in the 1960s and 1970s, we took a pretty good system, and in order to solve problems that needed tweaking, we made massive, fundamental changes that have had devastating consequences.

Now huge numbers of Americans know that the schools are places where their children are indoctrinated in anti-family values. Trust is not just going — for them it’s gone.

Huge numbers of children are deprived of two-parent homes, because society has decided to give legal status and social acceptance to out-of-wedlock parenting and couples who break up their marriages with little regard for what is good for the children.

Again, “what is good for the children” is apparently for them to suffer through an abusive fucking shithole relationship where spite has replaced real affection. Because divorce is horrible. Oh, and how fuckin’ DARE a parent go and DIE on their children! How irresponsible of them! Don’t they know they’re ruining their child’s life?

Yeah, let’s start arresting parents, or making them into fuckin’ pariahs. Let’s take children away from parents who aren’t married. Because that’s certainly fuckin’ healthy for kids. Much more so than, y’know, a child growing up in a loving relationship with two separated parents. Or a single parent. Or parents who aren’t married. Because societal classification trumps actual care any day.

Folks, you couldn’t get this much bullshit if you gave enemas to every cow in Texas.

Humpty Has Struck Before.

We’ve already seen similar attempts at redefinition. The ideologues have demanded that we stop defining “families” as Dad, Mom, and the kids. Now any grouping of people might be called a “family.”

Yeah, fuck actual love, man… it’s society’s labels that really matter.

The same thing will happen to the word marriage if the Massachusetts decision is allowed to stand, and is then enforced nationwide because of the “full faith and credit” clause in the Constitution.

What the fuck does this matter? You’d still fuckin’ hate the concept even if people could be legally and symbolically bound, but they called it “klupple” or something. Truth is, you hate fags, you hate the idea of them loving each other, and you’re just trying to mask it with your bullshit semantics. Let’s stop playing games, here.

[blah blah blah mother of fuck will he never fucking shut up already jeez]

Fuck it, I’m done. You can read the rest of the article yourself if you want. It’s extremely painful, but be my guest. I think I’ve stated my case sufficiently by this point.

Orson, I’m sure you’re a very smart guy. You’ve written some pretty good novels (though the bits where physically restrained boys urinate all over your obvious self-insertion character sort of creep me out), and though the science of the ansibles is maybe a little ridiculous, you’ve had some really interesting ideas. But all the semantics and rhetoric in the world can’t cover up the fact that your position, here, is absolute batshit, and completely unfounded social “analysis” that’s quite obviously just an attempt at justifying your prejudices by trying to demonstrate your intelligence. It just plain doesn’t work.

I don’t expect Orson to ever respond to this — mostly because I use profanity, and we’re all apparently five fucking years old and love making ourselves submissive to language to the point where bits we’re told are ‘bad’ override every other part of our brain — but it really doesn’t matter. I’m incontrovertibly right, here, and you want to know why? Because I don’t want to oppress anyone. It’s really rather simple. I don’t want to force Orson Scott Card to marry a man. I don’t want to force his church to marry gays. I don’t want to force any church to marry gays. Offending is not the same as oppressing, and pissing off a bunch of religious or culturally superstitious fuckwads is unquestionably preferable to controlling the ability of a person to symbolically and legally express their love for another individual.

By the way, since it doesn’t count for shit unless I actually advertise it: Janet and I aren’t getting married until gays can in the state in which we’re living. In other words, LACK of gay marriage is actually detrimental to our state of marriage. So fuck you, Card.