This is something I’ve been waiting for since at least the 90’s, and I’m not talking about the media catnip highlighted in the title. This November we’ll finally see the release of the movie version of Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi classic, Ender’s Game. Card has produced a lot of good work, but when I first read Ender’s Game, I was hooked. I did not wind up reading every book in the series, but the first four (also including Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind) were excellent. But the technology has only recently arrived to truly do the books credit in movie form, I think.

Unfortunately, there’s always somebody ready to pee in your pool, and a gay activist group known as Geeks Out has launched an effort to boycott the film.

The film “Ender’s Game” tells the story of a gifted child sent to a military academy in space to prepare for an alien invasion. It’s catnip for the Comic-Con crowd, and Lionsgate Entertainment wants to position it as November’s big-budget blockbuster. But the studio is encountering an unexpected publicity nightmare: an activist group called Geeks Out is pushing a boycott of the film, claiming that anyone who pays to see it will effectively be subsidizing antigay “fear-mongering.”

Geeks Out wants to sink the film to punish Orson Scott Card, who wrote the 1985 novel “Ender’s Game” and was one of several producers for the screen adaptation. In 1990, Mr. Card argued in the magazine Sunstone that “laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books” and “be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.” He was on the board of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex unions, from 2009 until this year.

Perhaps the most shocking part of this tale is that the linked article above actually condemns (if rather gently) the efforts to boycott the film, and it’s from a writer at the New York Times. (I’ll wait for somebody to fetch the smelling salts after that one.)

Card is no stranger to controversy when he steps outside of his fiction writing and gets involved in the public square. Long time Hot Air readers might enjoy a trip down memory lane all the way back to 2006 when Allahpundit introduced a podcast discussing some of the author’s socially conservative beliefs and interviews. Personally, I have little interest in such boycotts, and would prefer that the author’s work – and the subsequent film effort – be judged on its own merits.

Just please, please, please don’t make it in 3D. Or if you must, release a normal 2D version of it at the same time. 3D just ruins everything. (Well, except Piranha, of course. Oh, and it should be noted that the preview at that link is probably somewhat NSFW.)