Methodological problems with NHERI's study on youth and religion

I have a guest post up over at Libby Anne's Love, Joy, Feminism blog today.

The tragedy of Orson Scott Card

The geek blogosphere periodically directs its ire at sf author Orson Scott Card. Most recently, his participation in the Superman comics and the feature film of his book Ender's Game have provoked calls for boycotts.

The furor comes from the fact that Card is

a board member of the National Organization for Marriage, one of the largest and most well funded anti-gay activist groups in America, which works to prevent not only marriage equality but also civil union legislation and to legally prevent LGBTQ couples from adopting.

Card has very conservative political views, a fact which often surprises his readers since his books are about the worth of all people and love and empathy for humanity.

While Card's views on homosexuality--and quite a few other things--are truly execrable, what I feel like a lot of people don't realize is that Card was not always a hateful arch-conservative. Though a member of the conservative Mormon faith, Card once identified as a moderate and a Democrat. He has progressive views on space travel and fossil fuels.

But in the late 90s and early 2000s, his life essentially imploded. In March 1997, his fifth child Erin Louisa died the day she was born. In August 2000, his 17-year-old son Charlie Ben, a lifelong sufferer from cerebral palsy, died and was buried next to Erin Louisa. Card had been expecting his son's death for many years and had written his book Lost Boys, his self-proclaimed most autobiographical work, to cope with it. Then September 2001 occurred, and Card basically lost it.

My read on it is that Card, driven to the edge by sadness, got pushed over it by fear, somehow conflating the deaths of his children with the attacks on his country. Something similar happened to Zell Miller, who did a 180 on his politics in response to 9/11.

I don't think any of this excuses Card's views, and as an LBGTQ ally I'm still considering whether or not to boycott the Ender's Game film. I'm just Speaking for the dead, really. To me it's very tragic that a man who could create such beautiful works of art has been driven mad by grief.

Historical female characters

I make it a point to collect interesting stories about women from history, not ever having learned about too many of them who weren't queens.

Here is my latest haul.

Molly Ockett was a Native American healer of the Wabanaki people (part of the Algonquian alliance) of Maine and New Hampshire. She is remembered for her singular sense of humor and her ethics. The story I like best about her is that one day she went and gathered berries and brought them to a white friend of hers, a minister's wife. The minister's wife chided her for working on the sabbath. Molly Ockett rebuked her by saying that she had taken joy from gathering the berries as a gift, and that that was her way of being closest to God. Annoyingly, there is not a historical biography of Molly Ockett, just some amateur biographies collecting all the primary sources about her without any critical analysis and cultural context. One author, Bunny McBride, has written an interesting series of biographies of Native American women of the northeast. Partner and I were pretty bummed that basically the only information about Native Americans in Maine was in the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, which is lovely, but small.

Mary Kingsley was a Victorian British ethnographer and solo explorer of West Africa. She benefited from her status as a woman to gain anthropological insights her male colleagues could not.

Phyllis Greenacre was an early American pscyhiatrist, a student of Henry Cotton, one of those mad scientists they make horror movies about. She believed in his field, "surgical bacteriology", until she did a study on the patients who were being tortured and butchered and discovered that in fact this did not help them. Her teacher buried her work and expelled her from the clinic. Happily, she became a well-respected scientist in her field, with many publications.

Deborah Moody was the first woman to lead a European colony in the Americas. An Anabaptist, she abandoned Britain due to religious persecution and sought refuge at the Puritans' colony. Like Anne Hutchinson, though, she was horrified by the Puritans' puritanism. She left with a bunch of her followers and set up an independent colony, Gravesend, in Long Island where complete religious freedom was practiced. It eventually became a Quaker stronghold.

Anne Lister was a privileged British tomboy intent on finding a wife. Her lesbian marriage was eventually performed by a clergyman in England in 1834.