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Thanks to @TheBookOfAllan, I decided maybe Twitter slapfights about fantasy authors might not be Too Online to talk about here. I mean, let's face it, the nerd quotient here is pretty damn high. On the rare occasions I write a top-level post, it's usually about the intersection of Culture War squabbles and hobby drama. So -
First They Came for the Fantasy Authors
Brandon Sanderson, in case you don't recognize the name, is a best-selling fantasy author. In impact on the genre today, he's probably second only to George R. R. Martin. He famously finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, and he churns out new books at a rate that makes Stephen King look lazy.
(I have read quite a few of his books, and find them reliably entertaining, but Sanderson is a mediocre writer whose schtick is rigorously-defined magic systems and world-building, to the point that his books sometimes read like LitRPGs, and a big overarching cosmology called the "Cosmere" that unites every one of his series into his own personal MCU.)
Sanderson is also a Mormon. If you've noticed we're in the Culture War thread, you might have an inkling where this is going.
From time to time over the years, some LGBT folks have taken a run at Sanderson over his religion. In 2007 or so, he wrote a blog post offering a sort of milquetoast apologetic, basically saying he was totally cool with The Gays but he also believed in the divine revelations of his church so gay marriage is still a no-go, mmkay? He's been under continual pressure by fans to "update" his views, and he kind of has, saying he continues to "learn and grow." He's tossed a few gay and trans characters into his stories, and he's even written a FAQ: How Do You Feel About Gay Characters?. However, he remains a practicing Mormon, continues to tithe to the LDS, and has very carefully never actually walked back the belief that homosexuality is a sin.
So how has he avoided getting the Orson Scott Card/JK Rowling treatment? Well, for one thing, Sanderson is a genuinely nice guy who is affable with everyone, loves his fans, is very encouraging of new authors, and most importantly, generally avoids any kind of culture war and does not get into Twitter fights. He's got legions of defenders, and most of them accept his bland statements of tolerance and acceptance. It's pretty obvious that he does not personally dislike gay people, and I'm sure he would be thrilled if the LDS elders announced tomorrow that they just received a new revelation from God that He's totally cool with The Gays.
For most people, this is sufficient. There are people who are zealous and dogmatic about everything their church teaches, and there are those who clearly struggle sometimes with a religious doctrine that conflicts with their personal feelings. Most people recognize that everyone wrestles with cognitive dissonance, think "live and let live" is good enough, and if they like Brandon Sanderson despite disagreeing with his religious beliefs, they'll recite "no ethical consumption under capitalism" or "how to be a fan of problematic things."
Most people, but not Gretchen Felker-Martin.
Gretchen Felker-Martin is a transwoman with a single published book: Manhunt. If you wanted to create a hostile caricature of an unpleasant leftist conflict theorist who checks every stereotype, you'd have a hard time finding a better archetype. Think trans Arthur Chu with a foothold in SFF.
Manhunt is about (caveat - I haven't read it, this is what I gathered from reviews) a plague that turns all cis men into feral zombies, and in the post-apocalypse, brave stunning transfolx battle for survival against cismen and TERF hordes. (Yes, seriously.) They also harvest testicles for hormones or something, there's a ton of graphic rape and murder, and also apparently there's a throw-away line about JK Rowling being burned alive in her mansion.
Manhunt was published by Tor, which also, incidentally, publishes Brandon Sanderson.
So, a few days ago, Felker-Martin posted this tweet. (ETA: Hilariously, Twitter's new "added context by readers" feature is now defending Sanderson. I wonder how enraging that is to Felker-Martin?)
In itself, this would be hardly a skirmish in the Culture War. Trans woman doesn't like a Mormon author, wants to cancel him, writes stupid Tweet. It looks an obvious move to try to kneecap a rival, but Felker-Martin probably bit off too much to chew this time and has mostly been mocked for presuming to have some sort of gatekeeping role in deciding who SFF will "tolerate."
But - the reason I wrote this is because I've seen the Sanderson criticism take off a little bit, more than in previous attempts. His haters are really trying to give it legs. The Midnight Society, for example, is a woke satirist who is actually, pretty funny most of the time with really on-point skewerings of SFF and horror authors (except when taking obligatory swipes at JK Rowling by portraying her as a slithering snake hissing about Jewssss and transsss), and this tweet started out great (a completely deserved send-up of Sanderson's tropes) before shifting to an unsubtle signal-boost of the discourse started by Felker-Martin.
Twitter and Reddit seem to have an awful lot of "Hey, did you know Brandon Sanderson is a Mormon?" threads. (It is amazing to me that there are people who've been reading his books for years and had no idea - he does not make it a secret, and also I guessed by the end of the first Mistborn trilogy that the author was a Mormon without knowing anything about him.)
You can see all the usual arguments being recycled: "Should we cancel all Mormon/Catholic/Christian authors then?" (Felker-Martin: "Unironically, yes.") "It's just his personal belief, has nothing to do with how he treats gay people." ("But he TITHES and that means he is funding the LDS's Anti-Gay Death Camps!")
So woke fandom tried to take a scalp and overreached (this time), because while Tor is pretty darn woke, they're still not going to drop one of their biggest cash cows. Yet.
Can You Cancel a Bestseller?
Not literally, no. But can you hurt even a big name? Yes.
JK Rowling is still mega-rich, still a best-selling author, still beloved in most of the world. Yet I'm sure it does sting, even if she never says so publicly, that she and her books will never be celebrated again without an asterisk, that Harry Potter fandom tries to put her name in small print if at all, that she will never be reunited with the stars who she saw grow up and considered friends, until they were forced to denounce her. (Though in Emma Watson's case, it doesn't seem like much forcing was needed.)
They might not be able to Voldemort Brandon Sanderson, but being turned into a homophobic villain who is reviled by fandom and no longer invited to conventions would definitely hurt him. More cynically, Felker-Martin might know that Sanderson was too big a target, but that much smaller Mormon (and Catholic and Baptist, etc.) authors might be intimidated.
(Which makes me tempted to say, "Okay, now do Muslims," but there are only a handful of Muslim SFF authors I know of. The most famous is probably Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, an American Karen who converted to Islam and writes the Ms. Marvel comic book series. Saladin Ahmed wrote a few fantasy novels and also the Miles Morales Spider Man. Amal El-Mohtar is very in with the woke Hugos crowd. All of them apparently believe that Mohammad was totally cool with The Gays. It will be interesting to see if an actual tradcon Muslim ever tries to break into the industry.)
It's pretty sad that wokes are just about the only people who take religious commitments on their face (though I'm not sure if LDS doctrine specifically can be interpreted as demanding to kill all gays and queers, over basic Christianity, so it seems that what earns Mormons extra ire is having a functional Church this late into the game). Of course online wokes do it in bad faith (pun not intended), knowing well they won't ever be touched and just holding theists to task for their professed beliefs. And they succeed in wringing out apologies and clear signs of internal conflict and guilty conscience. This doesn't satisfy them, but this gives the lie to the notion that any theist beliefs which are seriously, consequentially divergent from the mainstream morality can be sustained. As a contemporary Christian, you cannot be in the world but not of it: your peers will recognize your seriousness as edgelord behavior, your children (if you find a partner) will cringe and apologize for their backward parent, and your faith will be reduced to a notional identity marker in a generation.
What goes around comes around. When, as a minority, you cast off the protective membrane of contempt for infidels, they dissolve you. The Haredim will prosper – in their unashamedly bigoted communities, under the umbrella of people bound to them by ethnic obligation. The Amish will survive as well, conditional on their continued legal recognition in the US. Everyone else...
There are reasons that people do not think that that commandment necessarily applies today. Essentially, when you look at the laws of the Old Testament, it's traditional (and seems pretty accurate) to divide them into
Moral laws, that is, things that you morally should just do (like, "thou shalt not murder"). These are true for everyone, everywhere, always, Israelite or not.
Ceremonial laws, laws fulfilling some religious purpose, directed towards Israel as a church, so to speak. The sacrifices or the dietary laws would be considered examples of these. These wouldn't apply to everyone in the world anyway, but Christians don't have to do them anymore because Christ fulfilled them or something (I don't fully grasp the theology of what's going on here), and you see as much said in the new testament (in Galatians, Acts, Hebrews, and others). We do sort of have some analogous things, like the sacraments, but it's a lot less extensive than what applied to the Jewish people before Christ.
Judicial laws, laws for Israel as a state, like punishments and so forth. But we don't live under the government of ancient Israel. We definitely still have things like these, but not necessarily the same ones, instead having whatever the government instituted. And different times can call for different laws, because the circumstances can change. I don't see any laws concerning the internet in there, and the law about having a fence on the roof of your house isn't so good when it's no longer normal to walk on roofs of houses.
So we have to follow moral laws, but not Israel's ceremonial or judicial laws at this point, those have replacements. Not committing homosexual acts would presumably be moral (given that new testament passages still speak against it). Punishing homosexual acts with death would definitely be a judicial law, and we don't follow ancient Israel's but the USA's judicial laws (or whatever other country). Now, of course, there isn't a problem with Israel's laws, God made them, and so punishing gay sex with death is still a legitimate legal system (well, probably, unless you wanted to argue that the severity was for ceremonial reasons to some extent), but not necessarily the only legitimate one, or the best one for the people of America.
So I'm not in principle opposed to having a death penalty for gay sex, but I don't think we have any sort of need to do that either, if that makes sense, and that's not due to thinking that it's outdated or something.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not Mormon, I don't know how well this matches for them.
Some of it was also just related to cleanliness/avoiding disease (food requirements, avoiding women on their periods (blood born diseases), etc.) and I can see men lying with men as falling into that category because of the realities of anal.
There's also the whole thing about baby making and you can only continue an ethnoreligion through babies and if everyone's coupled up with the same gender, there are no babies.
Babies are a very big deal to Mormons. They have so many of them.
I think there's definitely a case for that to an extent (see, maybe, the mildew or leprosy laws), but I think that those were still integrated to some extent into the system of worship, given that lepers were supposed to present themselves to the priests, and fit into the same system of ritual uncleanness that is used for everyone else, instead of having their own thing. The highlighting of physical filth as something that's unable to be brought into the presence of God would have spiritual implications, I think. See, for an application, Isaiah 6, where, when brought into the presence of God, Isaiah reacts "Woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips…" So uncleanness is taking on, at the very least in that context, some sort of moral character, and I think there's probably a good case to be made that there's something of that sort lurking underneath the whole cleanliness system—not to say that unclean things are morally bad in themselves, but maybe that they're used to help develop a visceral reaction against filth in God's presence, in such a way that it might cause them to be more aware of moral filth—maybe, I'm not some expert on this.
But I do think there's a good point that you're making there, that the seemingly ceremonial laws aren't necessarily purely just for ceremonial purposes, but there's often some prudential reason that could be lurking behind there to an extent. But there are, of course, other examples, like against the mixing of fabrics, that it would seem pretty hard to make a case that they would be of that variety.
Given the new testament (assuming you think you can trust it—I think most of the rest of what I was saying could generally be trusted by an atheist, but this bit can't), reiterates this, it would seem that there some moral component against homosexual sex given Romans 1 and similar. It doesn't read like it's merely about cleanliness in the mind of Paul.
I wouldn't trust the baby line of argument too much, just because 1) gay people make up a relatively low proportion of the population, at least currently, and I see no reason why that would greatly differ then and 2) I don't see too much of an emphasis in the time of Moses on fertility; I can't bring to mind any reiteration of "be fruitful and multiply" or similar, so that probably wasn't the greatest of the concerns in the drafting of the laws.
Or at least, I wouldn't trust that argument too much in the case of Ancient Israel. It's possible that it could apply to modern Mormonism, I suppose, although it seems unlikely to me, who am ignorant of their culture, that that would be the largest factor.
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