Jim Burroway

The National Organization for Marriage — the folks who brought you the much-mocked “Gathering Storm” ad — have taken on a real nutcase as the newest member of their board of directors. Joining the board and representing the LDS church is science fiction author and Mormon Times columnist Orson Scott Card. He replaces Matthew Holland, who is the son of a member of the LDS church’s Quorum of the Twelve, who recently stepped down from the board.

Last summer, Orson Scott Card called for the overthrow of civil government if California’s Proposition 8 had failed. Writing for the Mormon Times, he said:

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 …

In 2004, Card tried to address the argument that same-sex marriage would somehow diminish his marriage. That’s an argument that many anti-gay activists have had a hard time articulating. Most would concede, “Well, of course it wouldn’t affect my marriage,” but Card was game to give the argument a go. Claiming to have “gay friends” of his own, this is what he came up with:

But homosexual “marriage” is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society — to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction. So if my friends insist on calling what they do “marriage,” they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is. Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage. They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes.

He also thinks he understand why we want same-sex marriage. Raising the most-gays-are-gay-because-they-were-molested canard, he writes:

The dark secret of homosexual society — the one that dares not speak its name — is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally. It’s that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual “marriage.”

So this is just a small glimpse into the psyche of NOM’s newest board member. Maybe that explains the “Gathering Storm” ad. Scott may well have provided the script. Meanwhile, the parodies keep on coming: