The same kind of dialog that takes place on Sunday morning news shows is quickly creeping into discourse on Twitter. Everything has a he-said-she-said quality to it. Quotes are taken out of context, Twitter helps there, because it's legitimate to quote a tweet without including the ones before and after. So it's really conducive to David Gregory-type analysis. It's made for Maddow and Hannity.

Orson Scott Card wrote one of the best science fiction novels ever, Ender's Game.

I've read the book, and the series, and loved them. Radical ideas and great storytelling.

Imho Card has a gift.

He's a homophobe and a racist, and very open about it.

I know what it's like to want someone to lose their career because their ideas are so awful. The best example of that, for me, is Mel Gibson. I honestly felt he should lose his film career for what he said about Jews, my people.

I was surprised at myself, because I am generally pretty good, I think, at seeing things from multiple points of view, even ones I think are reprehensible. But not in his case. Maybe it's because I liked him so much, as an actor, it felt like betrayal that he was such an awful person. Maybe it's because the cultural memory of the pogrom of the last century is still too fresh.

Enough is enough, I felt. If someone wants to be that offensive in their public life, then they should lose the right to perform their art.

This felt so right, for something so wrong.

It's wrong to boycott someone's art because you don't like what they say, because it's so destructive to all art. Think of how other artists will act, if they know that their opinions, stated publicly, could deprive them of their livelihood. They're either going to temper what they say, or lose access to people to influence with their work. Taken to the extreme, and we're getting close to that because of the power of today's communication tools, you could have a witch hunt like the McCarthy Era in the US. There are many other examples in recent history.

Either way, we lose -- because art is produced by people who take risks.

It's Disney and Hallmark. It's America. It's what's wrong with art!

In the end, I decided I was wrong about Gibson, and Hollywood was right. Gibson should be able to perform exactly as if he had never said anything publicly. Not because we support his ideas, but because we recognize that people with extreme ideas are always awful to someone. And if we silence all controversy, we drift, we end up with empty lives and we do terrible things to ourselves and the planet. The stakes for being ignorant have never been higher.

The best thing to do, imho, is to add love to the lives of the people are hurt by the things Card says. Support them in other ways, without chilling all art. That's how we nullify the bad things Card does, and use him as an example of how great art can be appreciated, even over the objections of people, us in this case, who find him unsavory as a person.