08:33 pm: Oh no. I refuse to believe it. The universe is not so badly designed.
Orson Scott Card was given the
Margaret A. Edwards Award for his "outstanding lifetime contribution to writing for teens". The two books named are
Ender's Game and
Ender's Shadow, the novel and the paraquel about the infant Hitler who committed genocide of an entire species and then fled with his sister through thousands of years to a Brazil-type planet where he redeemed himself. (See:
Heterosexism all right for teens! on feministsf blog and
Farah at The Inter-Galactic Playground.)
Orson Scott Card is a bigot. He doesn't like
Muslims. He doesn't like
"homosexuals". He supports
Romney for President, and Romney's connections to
terror camps for teenagers are strong and direct. (
Read about the lawsuit. Seriously: Orson Scott Card wants the next President to be a man whose
two main fundraisers both made their millions running prison camps to which parents could send their adolescents who were being too gay or too uppity or too independent, to have them broken so they'd know not to be like that any more.)
But most of all... Orson Scott Card is a bigot. His bigotry isn't something away in the past, something he said or did when he was a teenager or a very young nan: he's written bigoted columns about
LGBT people (and about Muslims, now) in the past twenty years.
The Margaret A. Edwards Award is sponsored by
School Library Journal and administered by the
Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the ALA. Card will be honored at the YALSA Edwards Awards Luncheon and presented with a citation and cash prize of $2,000 during the
2008 ALA Annual Conference to be held in Anaheim, California, June 26-July 2. Believe me, if I could get there, I'd be picketing. If you can get there, picket for me. Giving Orson Scott Card a "lifetime achievement award" says something. It says that the people who decided he should get the award either did not know he is a homophobic bigot - which says they haven't informed themselves of much about him - or knew and didn't consider it important. Nor did they consider it important that he doesn't like Muslims.
Members of the 2008 Edwards Committee are:
Committee Chair Brenna Shanks,
King County Library System, 960 Newport Way NW, Issaquah, WA 98027, USA;
Patty J. Campbell,
Horn Book Magazine, 56 Roland Street, Suite 200, Boston MA 02129, USA (pcampbell@hbook.com);
Ruth Ellen Cox Clark, AA Library Education Tech & Distance Instructor, Joyner Library 1806, East Carolina University, East Fifth St, Greenville, NC 27858-4353, US (clarkr@ecu.edu);
Erin Downey Howerton,
Johnson County Library, 9875 West 87th Street, Overland Park, Kansas, KS 66212, US;
Kimberly L. Paone,
Elizabeth Public Library, 11 South Broad Street, Elizabeth, New Jersey, NJ 07202, USA.
(Where there are links, they go to "contact us" comment pages.)
Also, the American Library Association, 50 E. Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611. YALSA's e-mail address is yalsa@ala.org.
What I have in mind to do is send them all copies of
Dissecting Orson Scott Card. I'll format it all into one document and PDF it: if you'd like a copy too, comment here. If you don't feel someone who's
written that "The argument by the hypocrites of homosexuality that homosexual tendencies are genetically ingrained in some individuals is almost laughably irrelevant. We are all genetically predisposed toward some sin or another; we are all expected to control those genetic predispositions when it is possible" is someone who should be given a lifetime achievement award
for writing for teenagers, write to them, too.
---Update:
( The response I attempted to post at the Library Journal website )---Second update
( I wondered what inspired that rotten screed on gay marriage )---Third update
( YALSA responds )Current Mood: 
angry
,
dissecting orson scott card
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