Art & Creativity Quote by Orson Scott Card

Keeping those laws "on the books" isn’t really about prosecuting bedroom behavior; it’s about leaving a loaded weapon on the table. Card’s phrasing is strategically bureaucratic, the kind of language that pretends to be neutral while smuggling in a hierarchy: homosexual people as an exception that the state should reserve the right to discipline. The key move is the passive, archival-sounding metaphor. Not "enforce" the laws, just preserve them. That rhetorical softening invites plausible deniability - a way to argue for stigma without owning the cruelty of direct punishment.

The intent reads less like policy and more like cultural boundary-setting. In practice, statutes that criminalize intimacy do their most effective work without court dates: they legitimize discrimination, chill speech, and signal to employers, landlords, schools, and families that LGBTQ people are officially suspect. Even unenforced, they function as moral theater, a reminder that citizenship is conditional.

The context matters: Card is a major science-fiction author, a genre often associated with radical empathy, invented societies, and expanded notions of personhood. That tension is part of why the line lands with such force. It’s not merely "personal belief"; it’s the author of imaginative futures arguing to preserve a legal relic. The subtext is a longing for an older social order - and a belief that law should tutor desire, not just regulate harm. In a liberal democracy, that’s an argument for state power as a guardian of tradition, with sexuality as the chosen battleground.