Free To Hate

While discussing the Ender’s Game controversy, Rauch argues that hate speech is necessary for social progress:

To make social learning possible, we need to criticize our adversaries, of course. But no less do we need them to criticize us. … Some of the things [Orson Scott Card] has said are execrable. He wrote in 2004 that when gay marriage is allowed, “society will bend all its efforts to seize upon any hint of homosexuality in our young people and encourage it.” That was not quite a flat reiteration of the ancient lie that homosexuals seduce and recruit children—the homophobic equivalent of the anti-Semitic blood libel—but it is about as close as anyone dares to come today.

Fortunately, Card’s claim is false. Better still, it is preposterous. Most fair-minded people who read his screeds will see that they are not proper arguments at all, but merely ill-tempered reflexes. When Card puts his stuff out there, he makes us look good by comparison. The more he talks, and the more we talk, the better we sound.

Why he hopes the Ender’s Game boycott will fail:

I can think of quite a few reasons why boycotting Ender’s Game is a bad idea. It looks like intimidation, which plays into the right’s “gay bullies” narrative, in which intolerant homosexuals are purportedly driving conservatives from the public square. It would have little or no effect on Card while punishing the many other people who worked on the movie, most of whom, Hollywood being Hollywood, probably are not anti-gay (and many of whom almost certainly are gay). It would undercut the real raison d’être of the gay-rights movement: not to win equality just for gay Americans but to advance the freedom of all Americans to live as who they really are and say what they really think. Even if they are Orson Scott Card.

Above all, the boycott should fizzle, and I expect it will fizzle, because gay people know we owe our progress to freedom of speech and freedom of thought.