Reply #36: If you require all your art to be produced by really nice people,...

[cemaphonic]

you'll miss out on a lot of great art. I'm pretty sure that Cormac McCarthy could be described as conservative (though not a neocon) and he is awesome. I liked Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale, and he is a DC insider Repubican.

OTOH, I hate polemical axe-grinding in fiction. Authors that set up strawmen characters just for an excuse for a lecture irritate me no matter what the political leaning of the author. From what I've seen of Card, he does this a lot. Plus, I didn't like his writing to begin with, so it's fun to bag on his loony politics.