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Why are people homophobic (other than religion or “because it’s bad”)?
[answered by] Daniel Hamilton
A evangelical seeking to help others as God helps me Updated Mon
First, your use of the term “homophobic” needs to be addressed. For while some people are driven by a irrational fear of homosexuals or of being one, that simply does not justify the wanton political use of the term as a psychological tactic designed to intimidate any and all who oppose homosexual relations and the promotion of homosexuality with its expressions, and even those who will not affirm it.
Instead, consistent with the abuse of the term, it is many of those who use the term and or affirm the promotion of homosexuality and is expression who are homophobic, since they are motivated into doing so out of fear of being labelled that term by those in the prohomosexual side.
But the term “homophobia” does not accurately define any and all persons who do not approve of homosexual relationships or homosexuals any more than a person is necessarily ombrophobia if he/she does not like going out in the rain, or anthophobic if he does not like flowers, and to label all who like to stay inside as agoraphobia would be wrong.
Nor are all those listed in endless but extensive lists of phobias necessarily a bad thing, but,
"A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder defined by a persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation...Those affected will go to great lengths to avoid the situation or object, to a degree greater than the actual danger posed. If the object or situation cannot be avoided, they experience significant distress." (Phobia - Wikipedia) "A phobia is an overwhelming and debilitating fear of an object, place, situation, feeling or animal." (Overview - Phobias) "A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder that causes an individual to experience extreme, irrational fear about a situation, living creature, place, or object." (Phobias: Symptoms, types, causes, and treatment)
“an intense, persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, situation, or person that manifests in physical symptoms such as sweating, trembling, rapid heartbeat, or shortness of breath, and that motivates avoidance behavior." - Definition of phobia | Dictionary.com; "Phobia, an extreme, irrational fear of a specific object or situation." - Phobia | psychology; A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder. It is a strong, irrational fear of something that poses little or no real danger...People with phobias try to avoid what they are afraid of. If they cannot, they may experience Panic and fear Rapid heartbeat Shortness of breath Trembling A strong desire to get away. - Phobias | MentalHealth.gov; "phobia - an anxiety disorder characterized by extreme and irrational fear of simple things or social situations." - phobia.
And while it has come to be used more broadly, it actually means fear, not mere dislike. Etymologically,
"irrational fear, horror, or aversion; fear of an imaginary evil or undue fear of a real one," 1786, perhaps based on a similar use in French, abstracted from compounds in -phobia, the word-forming element from Greek phobos "fear, panic fear, terror, outward show of fear; object of fear or terror," originally "flight" (still the only sense in Homer), but it became the common word for "fear" via the notion of "panic flight" (compare phobein "put to flight; frighten"), from PIE root *bhegw- "to run" (source also of Lithuanian bėgu, bėgti "to flee;" Old Church Slavonic begu "flight," bezati "to flee, run;" Old Norse bekkr "a stream"). The psychological sense of "an abnormal or irrational fear" is attested by 1895. Hence also Phobos as the name of the inner satellite of Mars (discovered 1877) and named for Phobos, the personification of fear, in mythology a companion of Ares. - Origin and meaning of phobia by Online Etymology Dictionary
In contrast, by God's grace - and as a sinner saved by grace - I (as with many other evangelicals) for years I have sought to outreach and help all sorts of people, from Hell's Angels to homosexuals, and give a gospel tract (and sometimes food) but the latter especially tend to want to avoid such once they implicitly understand that the Biblical Christ represents a threat to their chosen lifestyle, though salvation from sin.
However, the term "homophobic" falls under "Non-medical, deterrent and political use" as the word is abused in assigning that label to any and all who oppose of even will not affirm homosexual relations and hold that the condition behind such is disordered.
And thus its typical use is indeed a psychological tactic designed to intimidate and silence opposition to the same - however conscientious - by placing them the defensive via charging them with being possessed by an irrational fear. Which plays off of a social phobia phobia, that of katagelophobia = fear of ridicule, being maligned by the prohomosexual lobby as being irrational, backwards, etc, and thus those who are intimidated by such could be the ones called homophobic.
And it is not simply some poster as me that objects to the use of homophobia, but scholars*
And which tactic follows (knowingly or not) the strategy set for in the book "After the Ball" years ago by two homosexual Harvard-trained graduates, Marshall Kirk (1957–2005), a researcher in neuropsychiatry, and Hunter Madsen (pen name Erastes Pill) whose social marketing advocated avoiding portraying gays as aggressive challengers, but as victims instead, while making all those who opposed them to be evil persecutors.
Associate all who oppose homosexuality with images of Klansmen demanding that gays be slaughtered, hysterical backwoods preachers, menacing punks, and a tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed. Thus, "propagandistic advertisement can depict homophobic and homohating bigots as crude loudmouths..."[58] " It can show them being criticized, hated, shunned. It can depict gays experiencing horrific suffering as the direct result of homohatred-suffering of which even most bigots would be ashamed to be the cause. It can, in short, link homohating bigotry with all sorts of attributes the bigot would be ashamed to possess, and with social consequences he would find unpleasant and scary... our effect is achieved without reference to facts, logic, or proof."
Moreover, as for fear, there should be a healthy fear of the unhealthy effects of sodomy. For
according to the CDC (chart), in 2017 male to male sexual contact was the mode of transmission in 93% of new HIV cases among male youth aged 13 to 24, and MSM accounted for 82% of diagnoses among males and 70% of all new HIV diagnoses, and 2 out of every 3 diagnoses in the United States. Which is despite only representing approximately 4% of the male population). . Also, "transgender women [worldwide] are 49 times more likely to have HIV than other adults of reproductive age." (Transgender people)
Likewise is 2019:
Young gay and bisexual men accounted for 83% (6,385) of all new HIV diagnoses in people aged 13 to 24 in 2019, and 81% of diagnoses overall of HIV infection among Adolescents and Young Adults, and 92% of HIV infections among men aged 13 to 24 was attributed to male-to-male sexual contact:
And which practice is primarily responsible for more than 700,000 people with AIDS having died since the beginning of the epidemic - despite decades of attempting to tame it into being "safe." (Worldwide, 77.3 million people have contracted HIV and 35.4 million have died of AIDS-related illnesses since the beginning of the pandemic in 1981: https://health.usnews.com/conditions/hiv-aids/articles/hiv-statistics.)
Also, sodomy is one manner of fornication, and which sin is primarily responsible for one out of 5 Americans having a sexually transmitted infection. Which affect all others, at least finacially: "STIs and their complications amount to about $16 billion annually in direct medical costs. HIV imposes the largest financial burden, costing $12.6 billion in direct medical costs, followed by HPV at $1.7 billion, chlamydia at $156.7 million, gonorrhea at $162.1 million, and syphilis at $39.9 million." (https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/STI-brief.pdf)
More.
*scholars such as Beverly A. Greene and Gregory M Herek in Lesbian and Gay Psychology (pp. 27,28) who stated:
...as Herek (1986a) notes, the term itself is unfortunate. Technically, homophobia means fear of sameness, yet its usage implies a fear of homosexuals. Although negativity toward gay men and lesbians is no doubt based on fear to some extent, the –phobia suffix implies a specific kind of fear—one that is irrational and characterized by a desire to remove oneself from the object of the fear. Because some people labeled homophobic not only fail to avoid homosexuals but also seek them out to harass and physically assault them, this term does not accurately rep-resent negativity toward gay persons (cf. Herek, 1986a). In addition, because such fear-based reactions to homosexuals appear to be more common among males than females (Herek, 1986b; Morin & Garfinkle, 1978), the term may be more applicable to heterosexual men than to heterosexual women. Another problem is that attitudes toward gay men and lesbians are likely to be multifaceted and complex (e.g., Millham, San Miguel, & Kel-logg, 1976; Plasek & Allard, 1984; Weinberger & Millham, 1979), and holding negative attitudes toward homosexuality likely serves different functions for different people (Herek, 1986a). Hence fear or aversion may comprise one component of beliefs about homosexuality, but other fac-tors are unquestionably important.
Several alternative terms have been offered to better reflect the ante-cedents of prejudicial attitudes toward gay men and lesbians and to sidestep the problems inherent with the term homophobia. These include homonegativism (Hudson & Ricketts, 1980), homosexism (Hansen, 1982), and heterosexism (Herek, 1986a). Unfortunately, none has gained wide-spread acceptance.
Then in in the Journal of applied Psychology, Gary Colwell wrote,
The charge of homophobia, indiscriminately made in a large part of our Western culture today, is ill conceived, illogical and false. This sweeping charge may be pictured as a triangle of informal logical fallacies. The more prominent side, the one which the general public encounters first, is what I shall call the fallacy of turning the tables: the rhetorical device of making the source of criticism the object of criticism. The other side of the charge is the fallacy of equivocation. The boundary of the term 'homophobia' is made so elastic that it can stretch around, not just phobias, but every kind of rational fear as well; and not just around every kind of fear, but also around every critical posture or idea that anyone may have about the practice of homosexuality. At the base of the charge, and undergirding the other two fallacies, is the fallacy of begging the question. A commitment to the complete acceptability of the practice of homosexuality enables its proponents to 'know' beforehand that all criticisms against it must originate in the defective psychology of the critic. (Journal of applied Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1999; Turning the Tables with 'Homophobia' on JSTOR)
Finally, etymology may tell us what a word means today, but that does not mean it is correct. Or that it’s use is, regardless of what Google reports.
