Maggie to the Rescue (Updated)

Jim Burroway has a post on Maggie Gallagher's reaction to the call to boycott Ender's Game. Needless to say, she considers it reprehensible that one in her camp is actually being held accountable for his public statements on gays, gay rights, and marriage equality. From The Corner:

Victor Davis Hanson’s article on “thought crimes” raised this question for me. Gay marriage advocates are trying to build up a boycott of Ender’s Game because of Orson Scott Card’s personal views on marriage.

To start with Victor Davis Hanson and "thought crimes" in the same sentence should give you a clue. And the misrepresentation starts right off the bat: it's not "gay marriage advocates" that are calling for a boycott, but a group of LGBT comic/gaming geeks who are offended by the idea that a vicious homophobic bigot stands to cash in on a movie made from a very popular, albeit in my opinion second-rate, book. The title of Gallagher's post is instructive: "What is McCarthyism?" As if she knew. (And Lionsgate, the distributors of the film, are distancing themselves from Card as much as they can.)

She elaborates in another post, and this is where the self-serving framing comes into full play:

But here’s what I believe about boycotts:

It’s fair to boycott a corporation as a corporation for something that corporation does as a corporation.

I think it’s unfair, destructive, and wicked to boycott a whole corporation because of the personal beliefs of one member of that corporation.

I think its repellent to boycott or blacklist an artist because of his personal views. It’s the heart of McCarthyism to me.

That said, people are free to buy tickets or not if they feel differently.

Line by line:

Boycotts: In this case, the corporation is pushing a film by a well-known and very vociferous bigot, which is not really different in kind from hosting "Gay Days" or supporting marriage equality in the corporation's home state. And, under the heading of "Self-Serving Rationalizations," note that NOM's boycotts are perfectly justified, even if spectacularly ineffective. No one else's are.

"Personal views" -- I'm going to reprint a comment I left at Burroway's post and go on from there:

It’s a given that an artist’s personal views and his/her creations are inextricably intertwined. (I seem to remember hearing about that recently in the case of a certain purveyor of wedding cakes in Washington State.) Whether those views always show up in the artist’s work is iffy — I’m reminded of the operas of Richard Wagner, a blatant anti-Semite. Are his operas anti-Jewish? Not on the surface, although the treatment of the Nibelungs in the Ring Cycle, for example, can certainly point that way. And that’s the whole point about art: it’s not on the surface, if it’s worth anything. But the ideas are there.

This has nothing to do with McCarthyism. (And I find it highly ironic that one of the foremost "social conservatives" in the country would hold McCarthy up as a villain. Any port in a storm, I guess.) This is not using your position as an official of the government to bring the power of that government to bear on those whose ideas you personally find unacceptable, which is out and out persecution. What we're seeing here is the free marketplace of ideas: Geeks OUT, the group behind the boycott, is calling on the public to make its disapproval of Card's bigotry apparent. Of course, Gallagher has made it known in the past that holding her or her allies accountable for their public statements is a violation of their rights. And like her fellows on the right, she has no patience with that particular free marketplace: For them (and only for them), freedom of expression means freedom from criticism.

The last line is Gallagher being magnanimous -- of course you're free to disagree with her. Just don't do it publicly.

And the saga continues to unfold.

Update: Jeremy Hooper has a good response to Gallagher's whining.