A boycott of Ender’s Game couldn't keep families away from the movies this weekend and the filmed topped the box office with more than $28 million. Last Vegas, the movie you’ll begrudgingly see with your parents over Thanksgiving, came in third place with $16.5 million.

A few years ago, I was idly talking to a group of friends about Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance. The book elegantly describes the gay culture of Manhattan and Fire Island at the time it was written, and in doing so shares some sentiment that reads less than politically correct to modern sensibilities. I lamented this—specifically some race jokes, which I think are supposed to be taken as straightforward humor—to the people that I was talking to, and one of them gently challenged my complaint. "I think that you have to take what you can from any piece of pop culture and ignore the bad stuff," she said with a shrug.

It's as if Orson Scott Card hasn't gotten the message of his own greatest work, Ender's Game, where the main character learns to tolerate people different from himself. The sci-fi writer's best-known work is widely read in Silicon Valley, a region full of people who pride themselves on their distinct talents and quirks. And for good reason. Ender's Game is a tale of a child, surrounded by bullies on Earth, plucked by a secret selection committee to train in space for interstellar warfare. Can you think of a more perfect metaphor for the entrepreneur who packs his bags for Silicon Valley, raises money for his brilliant idea, and becomes a tech superstar? Silicon Valley's startup scene is Ender's Battle School, with armies of programmers and natural gravity.I have to think Card's work also resonated with another demographic of kids who felt set apart from the crowd: Gay teenagers. Which makes Card's antigay screed, published in the Mormon Times, all the more hurtful. Card, a practicing Mormon, says he's against gay marriage. But he's really against gays, period — and thinks we should overturn the U.S. government to put his views into practice.