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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:
Upon learning in 1928 of T. S. Eliot’s conversion to Christianity, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister:
I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.
Flash-forward to the present day:
Orson Scott Card is monstrously homophobic; he’s racist; he advocates violence and lobbies against fundamental human rights and equates criticism of those stances with his own hate speech.
I would never, ever suggest that a student seek out his advice. I will not pay to see Ender’s Game; I will never buy another copy.
…Card is a monster who helped me learn to write, an author of hateful screed whose novels taught lonely, angry kids compassion and gave them their first sense of home. None of those things makes the others go away.
—Rachel Edidin, “Orson Scott Card: Mentor, Friend, Bigot,” Wired magazine.
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