Superman Comic Writer Edited Out of Series for Support of Traditional Marriage
One of the guest authors of DC Comics' upcoming Adventures of Superman series, Orson Scott Card, will not be included in the anthology series to be release this year because of his support for traditional marriage.
Over 16,000 signatures asking for DC Comics to remove Card from the project were collected on AllOut.org, an LGBT activist website, after it was announced that Card would be a writer. This led to the resignation of artist Chris Sprouse, who was the artist for Adventures of Superman, and Card's story being subsequently pulled from the first collected issue.
"We strongly support Card's right to support marriage as the union of one man and one woman, because kids do best when they are raised by their mom and dad and marriage is society's way of ensuring this happens for as many children as possible," said Thomas Peters, communications director for the National Organization of Marriage (NOM), in a statement to The Christian Post on Thursday.
Card is a board member of NOM, but is currently inactive, according to the organization. He does, however, continue to support NOM's mission of protecting marriage and the faith communities that sustain healthy marriages. Card is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon church.
NOM was founded in 2007 to serve as a national resource for marriage-related initiatives at the state and local level in response to the growing need for an organized opposition to same-sex marriage in state legislatures.
The traditional marriage advocacy group is not in favor of DC Comics asking Card to resign from his job if asked, because of his position on same-sex marriage. The group said, "Absolutely not. Holding pro-marriage views should not preclude anyone from employment and we will stand with anyone who is fired or punished by a corporation simply for exercising their core civil rights in defense of marriage," Peters said.
He added, "We have long called for civility and mutual respect in the marriage debate. We are always saddened when we see fear and intimidation used by gay marriage advocates to silence and ostracize supporters of marriage."
Card wrote in a 2004 online post, "Monogamous marriage is by far the most effective foundation for a civilization…" He went on to say, "What happens now if children grow up in a society that overtly teaches that homosexual partnering is not 'just as good as' but actually is marriage? Once this is regarded as settled law, anyone who tries to teach children to aspire to create a child-centered family with a father and a mother will be labeled as a bigot and accused of hate speech."
The writer also has also expressed his deep concern of school textbooks and television shows depicting same-sex marriage as positive. He wrote, "Can you doubt that the textbooks will be far behind? Any depictions of 'families' in schoolbooks will have to include a certain proportion of homosexual 'marriages' as positive role models. Television programs will start to show homosexual 'marriages' as wonderful and happy (even as they continue to show heterosexual marriages as oppressive and conflict-ridden)."
Card believes that there is a "dark secret" in the homosexual community, which he revealed in the post, "…the one that dares not speak its name – is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally."