DC Won’t Show Batwoman Same-Sex Marriage; Writers Quit

Batwoman writers JH Williams III and WH Blackman posted yesterday about why they will be leaving their duties as writers of DC’s most fiercely out gay female superhero:

Unfortunately, in recent months, DC has asked us to alter or completely discard many long-standing storylines in ways that we feel compromise the character and the series. We were told to ditch plans for Killer Croc’s origins; forced to drastically alter the original ending of our current arc, which would have defined Batwoman’s heroic future in bold new ways; and, most crushingly, prohibited from ever showing Kate and Maggie actually getting married. All of these editorial decisions came at the last minute, and always after a year or more of planning and plotting on our end.

I don’t normally get political on here; I know most of you don’t like it, and I also know that many of my best virtual friends and I probably have great differences in our beliefs. Regular readers may know also that I defend Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game as an artistic work despite the personal views of its writer, but my question to DC is this:

In a time when a major-party presidential candidate can defend same-sex marriage in an election year AND get reelected while doing so, and when you have a same-sex couple that you tout as proof of inclusiveness – why would you back away from showing their marriage, after planning to do so?

I would get it, DC, if you were a religiously oriented company that feels same-sex marriage is opposed to your faith. But you can’t be proud of a lesbian superhero AND be afraid to show her wedding. Not in the year 2013.

Hell, even if you’re guilty of what people accuse on a regular basis – pandering to horny adolescent males exclusively via Starfire’s costume and Catwoman’s explicit sex life – don’t you know that that demographic has zero issues seeing women kiss?

At the same time, I also fervently believe that you should seldom chalk up to evil something that can more easily be explained by incompetence, and DC is showing a lot of the latter lately.

So is this just pure idiocy – or cowardice? Neither one speaks highly of the company.

via Bleeding Cool