...but you should also remember that he's a racist, paranoid asshole, too. David Weigel at Slate would like to remind you of Card's 2008 speech promising that if elected president, Barack Obama would recruit black youth into a personal army that would..

...put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama's enemies.

Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people "trying to escape" — people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama.

The makers of the Ender's Game movie must be buying Excedrin by the truckload these days. But, anyway—back to Orson Scott Card's hateful homophobia! Slog tipper Luke just sent along a link to this 2002 essay by Kate Bonin that is a close reading of the homophobia and desire that appears in Card's novels. The thesis is this:

I propose to follow representations of homosexuality through a number of Card’s fictional works dating from 1978 to 1999. This twenty-year time span demonstrates how long and how consistently the same fraught image of gay desire has occupied Card’s imaginative interest. Indeed, his books return again and again to the same themes with a regularity that one is tempted to call obsessive.

Those of you who talk about separating the man from his work really ought to go read this piece.