Bullshit and Blasephemy
Hurley's mom said it best: "Jesus Christ is not a weapon."
This week at PodCastle we reprinted Leah Bobet's hilarious and awesome "The Parable of the Shower," read by Laurice White. You should give it a listen.
So I was supposed to write and record an introduction for it when the Orson Scott Card outrage started going off in rapid succession (for non-regular LJ folk, Jim C. Hines has a really good write-up about it all, but I first read William Alexander's review of "Hamlet's Father" over Rain Taxi). So at PodCastle, I went on a little rant in the intro, essentially calling bullshit and blasephemy.
The "bullshit" tag is probably obvious. Here's why I call blasephemy: If one of Jesus's two greatest commandments is to "Love your neighbor as yourself," then suggesting that because someone is gay they are not only indisputably evil but also probably a pedophile (which is "the moral" quite a few people have read from this book)? That's about as unloving as you can be.
It should be noted that I really like quite a bit of what I've read of Orson Scott Card's fiction - specifically Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and The Worthing Saga. I just grabbed Ender's Shadow from my library to listen to. It should also be noted that I haven't read Hamlet's Father, and probably will not. This one falls right around Left Behind for me - I wouldn't mind reading it one day, just to really be able to rage against it better, but there are a lot of other books I'd rather be reading first.
No blasephemy but just as much bullshit: Over at Genreville, Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown talk about how an agent offered representation for their YA SF book on the condition they either a) turn their gay protagonist into a straight protagonist, or b) completely cut out the character.
This week at PodCastle we reprinted Leah Bobet's hilarious and awesome "The Parable of the Shower," read by Laurice White. You should give it a listen.
So I was supposed to write and record an introduction for it when the Orson Scott Card outrage started going off in rapid succession (for non-regular LJ folk, Jim C. Hines has a really good write-up about it all, but I first read William Alexander's review of "Hamlet's Father" over Rain Taxi). So at PodCastle, I went on a little rant in the intro, essentially calling bullshit and blasephemy.
The "bullshit" tag is probably obvious. Here's why I call blasephemy: If one of Jesus's two greatest commandments is to "Love your neighbor as yourself," then suggesting that because someone is gay they are not only indisputably evil but also probably a pedophile (which is "the moral" quite a few people have read from this book)? That's about as unloving as you can be.
It should be noted that I really like quite a bit of what I've read of Orson Scott Card's fiction - specifically Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and The Worthing Saga. I just grabbed Ender's Shadow from my library to listen to. It should also be noted that I haven't read Hamlet's Father, and probably will not. This one falls right around Left Behind for me - I wouldn't mind reading it one day, just to really be able to rage against it better, but there are a lot of other books I'd rather be reading first.
No blasephemy but just as much bullshit: Over at Genreville, Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown talk about how an agent offered representation for their YA SF book on the condition they either a) turn their gay protagonist into a straight protagonist, or b) completely cut out the character.