Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great
You misunderstood my post. Mr. Card usually does not write in this inflammatory style. He chose to do so for this one essay. Ask yourself why.
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I disagree that he usually (in the context of his essays) doesn't write in this inflammatory style - he's written this way, though usually not going quite so far, about other social issues as well. All three of his major pieces on homosexuality seem pretty inflammatory to me. And he is generally taken to mean exactly what he says in them - do a web search for "Orson Scott Card homosexuality" to see how he has been interpreted for *years* (the first written of the essays I linked to above was written in 1990).
I know if *I* wrote an essay that was intended as over-the-top obviously ironic commentary on a topic and was taken by the public at large as meaning exactly what I said (and hence something quite different from what I intended), I'd quickly go "Gack! No, guys, that was irony!" No such response from Card, though he has said that he doesn't think gay folks should be beaten up. Huzzah!
And his conclusion that if you have belief system X and the government does Y then the government has no moral authority and should be removed follows an article *arguing for* belief system X and that the government is doing Y. When you pair that with the fact he's argued for belief system X in the past and against the government doing Y, its hard to imagine how he *could* be speaking tongue-in-cheek.