Thinking about Wiscon

As many of you know, Elizabeth Moon recently made a post about citizenship, Islam, and assimilation that combined a rather narrow view of what assimilation should mean with claims that Muslims are inherently unfit for citizenship. It was quickly and widely linked to, and a lot of people argued with her in comments on her LJ. After two or three days, Moon deleted all the comments and basically declared the conversation over.

I've read and liked some of Moon's books, but this isn't the first time I've been disappointed by the opinions or actions of writers whose fiction I liked. The reason this is an immediate issue is that Moon is one of the guests of honor for next Wiscon; the other is Tiptree Award winner Nisi Shawl (nisi_la). The responses to Moon's post included requests that Wiscon rescind that invitation, because the opinions Moon was stating were offensive, and inappropriate to the Wiscon ethos.

The concom have thought about it, and decided that Moon will still be co-GoH next May. What they say about wanting to open a dialogue sounds good, but not having been privy to the concom's conversations with Moon, I don't know what sort of dialogue she's interested in having on any of those topics. (I am assuming they're using the term loosely to mean a conversation between people who start out disagreeing, rather than a literal one-on-one.) But that isn't the main point. The problem is that we may lose other people, either people who've been coming for years but now feel unwelcome, or people who were thinking of attending for the first time, and now don't feel welcome or safe.

I don't know how much can be achieved with even very good programming, given this context: but I suspect there's going to be a lot of 101-level discussion, again, and people torn between wanting to counter prejudice, and being tired of having to do so over, and over, and over.

I've been going to Wiscon regularly for fifteen years. In a number of ways, this is my community. I'm still planning to attend, partly to support Nisi and partly because there is a lot that is good about Wiscon, and a lot of people I want to see. But that's an easier choice for me than for some of my friends, because while I disagree with what Moon is saying, it doesn't make me personally feel unsafe or unwelcome. I'm not one of the people she disapproves of, and who hear similar views in too many other places.

(I don't remember, this long after, whether anyone tried to convince con committees not to honor Orson Scott Card that way, after he'd started arguing that the government should arrest and imprison enough gay people to scare the rest of us [back] into the closet. I just know that I skipped a few cons because of him.)