Do we like Orson Scott Card?
Our score: 2 out of 10. A long record of his own words and campaigning against same-sex marriage, plus the Obama essay, with only a little good found to set against it.
Card is the bloke behind Ender's Game, which started as a 1977 short story and became a 1985 novel. He's a Hugo and Nebula winner, and in 2024 he was a last-minute addition at DragonCon in Atlanta and still drew one of the biggest author crowds, according to a sympathetic write-up. For a lot of sci-fi readers, that's the problem: the stories are loved, and the man is a harder sell.
The Superman saga is the one most people remember. In 2013 DC Comics lined him up to write an issue of Adventures of Superman, and artist Chris Sprouse then dropped out amid the uproar over Card's views on gay marriage. NPR reported that the project was put on hold, and that Card has described homosexuality as “deviant behavior”.
Here's what he put in his own words. In a May 2012 op-ed for The Rhinoceros Times, he argued there was no need to legalise gay marriage, wrote that no discriminatory laws remained standing, and called same-sex attraction a “reproductive dysfunction”, as HuffPost reported. ThinkProgress also reported that he joined the board of the National Organization for Marriage in 2009, a group fighting marriage equality, and that Entertainment Weekly said he quietly left in 2013.
When the Ender's Game film arrived, the group Geeks OUT launched a “Skip Ender's Game” campaign. Card's reply to Entertainment Weekly said that after the Supreme Court ruling “the gay marriage issue becomes moot”. He added that it would be interesting to see whether the winning side would show tolerance to those who had disagreed. That's a statement asking for tolerance for himself, not one that retracts anything, and the studio publicly backed gay couples while keeping its distance.
The harm check goes beyond marriage. In August 2013 attention turned to a blog post from May in which he wrote that Obama “could become lifetime dictator without any serious internal opposition”. Later that year a group petitioned for his removal from a University of North Carolina TV board role, and Card told the student paper his views were “within the mainstream of political thought in North Carolina”.
The record is thin in places. Nothing turned up on his stance toward trans people, vaccines or climate, and he has no court cases or workplace allegations that we could find. The good-person side is therefore mixed because there's little evidence of how he treats people, rather than because anything bad turned up. We found no charity work to set against the harm.