Even at their most reactionary, superhero comics are still sooooo gay!
 
Orson Scott Card is considered one of the greatest living science fiction writers, with his Enders Game series one of the most influential franchises in the genre.

He’s also a practicing Mormon, a crazypants homophobe, and a member of the board of directors of the National Organization for Marriage!

So it’s kind of baffling that DC comics just hired him to write two issues of their brand new digital Superman comic.

Here are some of his interesting views on gay marriage:

Calling a homosexual contract “marriage” does not make it reproductively relevant and will not make it contribute in any meaningful way to the propagation of civilization.

In fact, it will do harm. Nowhere near as much harm as we have already done through divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing. But it’s another nail in the coffin. Maybe the last nail, precisely because it is the most obvious and outrageous attack on what is left of marriage in America.

Oh what the hell? Let’s throw in some crazy heteronormative, borderline eugenicist social Darwinist bullshit, for fun!

Monogamous marriage is by far the most effective foundation for a civilization. It provides most males an opportunity to mate (polygamous systems always result in surplus males that have no reproductive stake in society); it provides most females an opportunity to have a mate who is exclusively devoted to her. 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.

Now it’s one thing to read a classic by an artist with bad ethics morals, or politics—we consume art all the time we know to be problematic, and we can still enjoy it without compromising our critical eye. It’s another thing entirely to hire a well-known bigot activist and expect his literary reputation to supplant his awful crusade.

In a 2008 editorial in the Desert News, Card threw this down:

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

Nice! Clearly comics have their own problematic histories, but do DC comics really think it’s a genre that can succeed in a homophobic context? Do they not have eyeballs or live in this century?

Some comic stores are refusing to stock Card’s Superman issues and a petition has also been started to get DC to drop him.

Come on DC. Really? I mean really?