September 13, 2025

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My beloved niece, who is going to college in Utah Valley (not at UVU, not at BYU), telephoned her father, who was at work in the library in our home. He came and told the news to my wife: Charlie Kirk has been shot, while speaking to students at UVU. My niece had been there to listen to his message. She needed to call her dad.

My wife had to explain to me who Charlie Kirk was. I probably saw him on some talk show or other, and his name sounded familiar, but I did not know what Turning Point USA was, or the kind of career -- no, ministry -- that Charlie Kirk had conducted.

But I did know Utah Valley, and UVU. I have taught workshops on that campus, I have walked and run and cycled on those impossible hills. My brother is on the faculty at UVU. I felt an immediate wave of grief that someone had brought a murderous heart onto that campus and struck down someone whose only crime was speaking of his beliefs and listening to the beliefs of others.

Orem, Utah, became my home in 1967, and for many years my parents lived there, as also the parents of my wife. Even now, when most of my siblings have moved away from Orem, going there still feels like going home. So on Wednesday, as I left my house to teach a class of high school creative writing students, I found that I could hardly drive for weeping. Because such evil had come to my home.

In the days since then, I have wept many times, as I learned about Charlie Kirk's work, the principles he taught, the example he set. I was proud when Governor Cox of Utah pointed out that the people of Utah -- in many ways my people, though I have lived in North Carolina since 1983 -- did not riot, did not loot and burn, but instead gathered in vigils and prayer, and came together in peace.

I have watched as America's universities became indoctrination chambers for principles that I believe are both false and evil. They have become places where I have not been welcome -- even before I was canceled -- because most universities are intolerant of any but the approved opinions.

I have long told writing students who have asked me, "What should I major in at college?": Why are you going to college, if you want to write? They have nothing to teach you as a storyteller. You don't need indoctrination, you need life and ordinary people who don't think they're smart but who work to make a living and be good parents.

If you want to write stories that other people will care about, you need to know who those people are. You will get better preparation as a storyteller by working at entry-level jobs and being kind to the others who work there. They will give you your writing career, by teaching you about the behavior of people under stress, and by introducing you to your readers, so you'll know who you're talking to.

The stories that move me most, as an audience member, are the stories of good people doing good.

Back when my novel Ender's Game was being released as a mediocre movie, an erstwhile friend collected everything I had written about gay marriage, which was then still a political issue, and quoted very selectively to make the things I had written mean the opposite of what I meant. She did it knowingly and deliberately, intending to destroy me and my career. Because I had taken the "wrong" side on that issue, I did not deserve to make a living or have my books read; I needed to be punished for my thought.

Then she put out her kill document anonymously on the Internet, and believed, I'm sure, that she had done a noble work.

The irony is that everything she did depended on a primary lie: that the only reason why anyone could possibly oppose gay marriage was because of a deep, pathological hatred of gay people.

This is ridiculous on its face, particularly to anyone who knows me. My life is rooted in theatre, and I have known and worked with gay people my whole adult life. At first I had no idea of what homosexuality even was, and my best friend in high school and my best friend during my launching of a repertory theatre company in Utah Valley did not come out as gay until after our close involvement. But other dear friends who know that I love and admire them without regard to their sexual orientation knew that the impression left by that kill piece was a false one. (I do not name them, because they do not deserve the opprobrium that would come to them if people of slender wit knew that I considered them to be my friends.)

There is no answering such scurrilous material, of course. On my website I posted the context of the quotations and what they actually meant, but I am reasonably sure that almost no one ever tried to find out if the accusations against me were true. And so began my decade in the wilderness of cancellation.

Here is what I did: Nothing. The author of Ender's Game should have been invited to high school and college campuses every week of the year, but of course no one dared to do that now that I had been tarred as a monster of pathological hate. And when some bookstore manager or sci-fi convention organizer innocently invited me to make a public appearance, we immediately warned them: The haters never rest, so if you announce that I'm coming, you will find your store or your convention picketed by people making false accusations against me.

A few of them laughed it off. BosKone, one of the most venerable sci-fi conventions, invited me to Boston anyway. Several professional writers threatened not to attend if I was there; their answer was, We'll miss you, but Card is coming. Another convention in Florida braved the opposition. Author Services, who publish Writers of the Future, have been unflinching in including me in their projects. And in foreign countries, nobody cared.

I got invited to speak at a few religious colleges and universities -- they had a harder time overlooking the fact that I wrote science fiction than that I had opposed gay marriage.

But during all the years of my cancellation I have written nothing and said nothing about gay marriage, because when the Supreme Court ruled on the matter, the question died.

The question? To the bigots of Cancel Culture, there never was a question. When someone decides the Correct Attitude, then anyone who disagrees is both stupid and evil, a judgment that cannot be rescinded.

During all the years that I was politically active, on that and other questions, I never had anyone make a credible attempt to argue with the positions I actually held. There is no attempt, ever, to persuade, only to silence and punish and destroy. Dialogue is impossible.

My position was, simply enough, that heterosexual pair bonding has been a core practice in successful human cultures for tens of thousands of years, and cultures that don't sustain and support it are doomed to be supplanted by cultures that do. And no government has the power to alter the fundamental nature of marriage, even if they coerce people to pretend otherwise. It's not about hating anybody, least of all my friends who have joined in homosexual unions. They do me no harm, and our culture gives them its blessing. But I did not lose the argument, because nobody introduced a shred of evidence or logic to oppose me. Just feelings, as if the only feelings that mattered were theirs, so there was nothing to discuss.

What Charlie Kirk did, I have learned in the past few days, was go to the colleges and universities where conservative speakers are shouted down or (more commonly) banned from visiting in the first place. There he patiently listened to the accusations of people who thought name-calling was how to answer unapproved ideas, and then answered them calmly with facts and logic. He probably didn't persuade the angry accusers -- it's hard for a person who has spoken in fury to back down from their hostile declarations. But there were onlookers who listened and opened up their minds. They had been told that people like Charlie Kirk were evil Nazis, but he shared his microphone with people who disagreed with him. Nazis don't do that. Nazis shout you down, throw you out, send Brown Shirts to beat you up, or send snipers to kill.

Charlie Kirk actually got young people to think, to stop reciting empty slogans and malicious stupidities they had been taught by others and actually figure out what they believed, and why they should believe it.

He told the truth, as he perceived it.

Years ago, I was invited to speak at a conference of college interdisciplinary studies departments. It was held on the campus of a state university in a conservative, largely Christian state. I began my speech by pointing out that one of the sessions at the conference was announced to be about "How to get your students to give up the religious traditions of their parents." It was the most open statement of that agenda that I had ever heard.

I asked them: At universities funded by taxes taken by force from the pockets of religious parents, where your duty is supposedly to educate students and open their minds, how do you justify taking their money while propagandizing their children to reject their parents' culture and faith?

I was not beloved for that speech, though I was allowed to finish. (I said this was years ago -- decades ago.) But I think that it was obvious in the years since then that the attitude of that session is the dominant one at almost all universities and colleges in America.

So in private conversations, for decades I have asked my friends, "Why are you sacrificing to send your children to college? There are a few professions where it makes sense -- medicine, engineering -- but it is still possible to start working at a low level, making little money, and work your way up the ladder. In the process, your kids won't be taught to despise everything you believe in."

But they still believe, most of them, that the university is the foundation for a "good" career. And having once raised the matter, I don't bring it up anymore. Besides, most of my friends are planning to send their kids to Brigham Young University -- not realizing that there is no dearth of functional atheists even there, wearing sheep's clothing.

So here I am, after a decade of silence, weeping over the murder of a man I never met and barely knew of, and I think: Should I have said, Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead?

No. I would have accomplished nothing and I have no taste for confrontation. My life is much better for being cancelled. I haven't wasted my time shouting into the abyss. I have served my family as best I could, written my little made-up stories for which I am probably overpaid, read books, watched television, and lived in quiet and privacy. Did they think that was punishment for an introverted writer?

From what I have heard, Charlie Kirk's primary message was faith in Jesus Christ. Years ago, when science fiction was still an open-minded, accepting community, I used to do a presentation at conventions called "The Secular Humanist Revival Meeting." Though my church does not have revival meetings, I was familiar with the format, and so was the audience, so that a good time was had by all. But despite the title, by the end it was very clear that I was a believing Christian, who believed that there was no contradiction between honest science and honest religion.

After every one of these revival meetings, a few people would come up to me and confess that they had been coming to conventions for years, but had always hidden their religious faith to avoid embarrassment. By openly proclaiming my faith -- in the midst of an entertaining show -- I had made them feel, for the first time, that a person of faith could belong to that community. I had nothing like the effective ministry of Charlie Kirk, but I certainly left no doubt that a person could write books like mine and still be a faithful, practicing believer in God and member of a community of faith.

I have also had many opportunities to say to young people just starting out in life, "Don't wait to have children until you can financially afford it. You can never afford to have children. You do it anyway." My mother's family was so devastated by the Great Depression that one year they had to farm out the children to relatives who could feed one extra mouth, because my grandmother, abandoned by her husband, couldn't afford to feed more than her mentally retarded second-youngest daughter, whom she could not place with anyone else.

Here's the surprise: Poverty did not damage them. They thrived anyway. They grew up to be smart, productive members of society.

And my parents, after the Depression, raised their six kids (I'm the third) in the shadow of the Depression. There were hard times, and they didn't hide it from us. There were things we couldn't do and things we couldn't have because there wasn't enough money for it. But there were books and there was respect for education. I became an auto-didact because even when California had the finest public schools in America, it wasn't enough for me. And my parents encouraged my self-education.

I remember well when my dad came into my room as I was reading a book about early humans, and, concerned that evolution might confuse me, said, "Scott, remember, when religion and science disagree, one or the other or both of them are wrong."

At the age of ten, I didn't understand the context of his statement, but I never forgot those words, because my father was telling me that our understanding of our own religion is not final, not complete. We might be wrong about some things. So I didn't grow up within a wall of unassailable religious dogma. Instead, I was free to explore everything and reach my own conclusions.

You know, the kind of education that American universities work so hard to prevent.

But now I join readily with Charlie Kirk in saying: Marriage is a good thing. Having children is a good thing. Yes, you'll make mistakes in both enterprises, but so what? Keep loving your spouse and your kids and keep moving forward. Your kids will find their own way. They may grow up to fill you with joy and pride. They may break your heart. No guarantees.

It's called life. It's living. Stuff happens, good and bad, and God does not intervene to spare the righteous from pain. His plan is for us to live -- and die. To be healthy or sick, firm or crippled -- what matters is that no matter what, we will demonstrate, we will discover, who we are, what we're made of.

And one day, as I have been reminded of -- by newscasters, of all people -- we should hope to enter into the divine presence, having left our bodies behind, and hope to be greeted with the words, Well done, thou good and faithful servant.

Whether your life is public or private, nothing is more important than our family life. As David O. McKay said, and my parents often repeated, "No other success can compensate for failure in the home." I have learned that you can't stake your idea of success on your children's free decisions as adults. You can only fail by not teaching them correct principles and not treating them with love and acceptance and patience and kindness. If you have done those things, you have not failed, no matter what they decide to do.

I have wept these past few days for Charlie Kirk, for his family, for the shattering loss inflicted on them by the evil people who wrongly called him a fascist, when everything he did expanded other people's freedom. But I have also wept for the father of the assassin, for the choice his boy made, and for how it must have broken his heart.

My heart has been broken -- by my handicapped son's limitations and early death, by the loss of a baby girl who died the day she was born, and by some of the choices some of my children have made, and some of the challenges and disappointments they have had to live through. That is what life is, and raising children brings joy, but it also brings heartbreak. I live with a broken heart, for there are some losses that time does not heal.

But I thank God -- I thank my surviving children -- that they are living lives of kindness and love, toward their families, toward the people that they work with. My remaining son is a good father, my older daughter is a good mother, their children are being raised in the light of intense and continuous love. And my as yet unmarried daughter is in a career in which she tends to the needs of other people's children, and makes their lives better as far as they allow.

I am so grateful that I have not ever had to say to a child of mine, "We raised you with freedom, but you freely chose to end the life of another person. Now, the only freedom you deserve is to face a judge and jury who will decide whether your life is worth allowing to continue."

That father, those parents, face a grief much greater, I believe, than the grief of the widow and children Charlie Kirk has left behind, who will grow up being proud of their father's legacy, sharing in the glow of the love so many strangers had and have for him. But the assassin's family will live with the grief of his choice, without remedy, remembering when he was little and they had so much hope for him, and now facing the loss of hope because he closed all the doors of honor for himself.

And yet I know, I know, that they still love their son, even in the midst of disappointment and shame. They love him, and will still love him when he enters into prison, when he dies without having had a family of his own. Because that is a love that cannot be broken, though the loving heart may break. I don't need to pray for Charlie Kirk's soul, though my wife and I are including his widow and children in our prayers. But my most fervent prayers will be for the family of the assassin, who cannot be comforted or assuaged.

My prayers are for the father who led his son to turn himself in to the authorities, to face the consequences of his awful choice. Because that is what a good man does, when his son has done great wrong. He helps his son to stand up and bear what he has earned.

To have children is what our genes demand that we do, however fearful we might be. And there are no guarantees. Our children might make us proud. They might cut us off and break our hearts. They might do great wrong, no matter how well we taught them.

But we are all God's children, and he leaves us all free to make him proud or break his heart. All we can do is try to make him proud, and when we fall, stand up again, as tall as we can, and bear what comes to us.

Well done, Charlie Kirk. Well done, all you who did your duty in trying to bring his killer to justice. Well done, father of the boy who killed him, for helping him stand up and face accountability.

Whoever would be great among you, said the Savior, let him be the servant of all. Charlie Kirk lived that way, I am told. My job now is to try to do as well, within the garden in which I have been planted. Your job is the same.

In Charles Dickens's immortal words, through the mouth of a fictional crippled child: God bless us, every one.