In a recent statement to Entertainment Weekly, Orson Scott Card responded to a proposed boycott of the upcoming film adaptation of his novel Ender's Game by informing the movie-going public that it doesn't really matter that he's been working ceaselessly for the last decade to make sure gay people don't get basic human rights, or that he advocated the violent overthrow of the government should same-sex marriage become legal, or that he's used his position as a popular author as a platform from which to spew increasingly aggressive anti-equality rhetoric like his comment in a 2004 essay that gays "cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.”

"The gay marriage issue is moot," Card reassured readers in his statement to EW, apparently under the impression that the recent Supreme Court decisions regarding the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 were sufficient to erase the history of legislated bigotry he worked tirelessly to promote and preserve in his fight against equal rights.

Really, Card could have stopped there. Instead, he went on to wonder "whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute." His concern, ostensibly, is that someone might be petty enough not to see his movie simply because he spent years lobbying for laws that treated certain people as less than human. The fallacy he employs here – that calling out hate-speech is intolerance on par with curtailing the human rights of others – is a favorite fallback of cowards and bullies, and a way of evading responsibility for the impact of their words and actions.

Or maybe Card fundamentally misunderstands what "tolerance" means. Tolerance doesn't mean forking over 10 bucks to see his movie. It doesn't mean smiling graciously while he calls same-sex marriage itself "an act of intolerance" and equates homosexuality to pedophilia. And it certainly doesn't mean that he gets to decide when an issue that has never affected him in any substantial way is moot because his flood of bigoted screeds have begun to overshadow his work in the public eye.

No, Card gets exactly what his opponents get: the right to keep saying whatever he wants in his own space. What he doesn't get is the moral high ground he's so desperate to claim. He forfeited that long ago, and if his opponents' tolerance is so vital to him now, perhaps he should have defined his public image by something other than intolerance.

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