Prejudice and raging hate are pretty much one and the same. There is no actual logical reason for the dislike, it’s all emotion. Fear, aggression, hatred. It comes out in different ways, depending on the person exhibiting the phobia. It can be insidious or very obvious.
A lot of people will attempt to assign what they consider to be logical reasons to their fear and bigotry. I don’t buy it. It’s justification to oneself that you’re (general you) not a bad person for treating someone shoddily based on the gender of their partner. And by treating shoddily, I include everything from sneering comments to attempting to have laws passed to keep those people from enjoying the same rights as every other individual.
“prejudiced against gays” : 3
no, we can’t: 2
yes, look it up: 2
irrational fear and/or hatred of homosexuals and homosexuality: 1
everyone knows what it means: 1
Why can’t you give the post in the affirming way you wish?
approbation.
Main Entry: ap·pro·ba·tion
Pronunciation: "a-pr&-'bA-sh&n
Function: noun 1 *obsolete *: PROOF 2 a : an act of approving formally or officially b : COMMENDATION, PRAISE
To clarify: I would suggest that the people who resist honest efforts to clarify the terms under discussion in order to aid mutual understanding are the ones I put into the category of “further conversation will likely be pointless.”
Homophobia is a catch-all term for any attiude which is hostile to or judgemental of homosexuality or homosexual people. The intensity of homophobic feelings can range from the mild to the rabid. Just to answer the same question that always comes up- if you think homexuality is “immoral” but you don’t actively do anything to hurt homosexul people, you ARE homophobic, you’re just not very intense about.
Where I grew up, a lot of people expressed dispproval of interracial relationships. They didn’t go aout and bur crosses or persecute black people but they were still racists. “Homophobe” is basically equivalent to “racist.” It encompasses any feelings of dislike, disapproval, fear, loathing, etc for a group of people based solely on an innate characteristic which they cannot change and which has no bearing on what kind of people they are. Religion does not excuse homophobic feelings or make them any more rational than it does for racism.
The word has been around long enough for people to know what it means. It is a bias or prejudice. It is an assumption that something is wrong with “them”, or that “they” are not as good. Again, the word has been around long enough so we all know what it means.
Every now and then, in a thread about gay rights or anti-gay prejudice, you’ll get some asshole who tries to derail the thread by nitpicking the definition of “homophobe.” “The guys who killed Matthew Shepherd weren’t homophobes, because homophobe means you’re afraid of gays, and if they were afraid of him, they’d have run away instead of attacking him!” Shit like that. It’s aggravting enough on its own, and the people who post stuff like that are usually pushing an anti-gay agenda.
Anyway, my own definition of the term is pretty much identical to Diogenes’.
First, this strikes me as argument by name-calling. If you disagree with someone, it’s far more intellectually honest to explain what’s wrong with their position than to simply dismiss them by labelling them “phobic” or some such.
Second, I think it blurs a useful distinction between those whose opposition to homosexuality is based on irrational fear (“Gays are destroying marriage!” “They’re trying to convert our children!” “Watch out—you’ll catch The Gay”) and those who have a reason for thinking homosexuality is immoral (in which case you might be able to show them where their reasoning is flawed or based on faulty premises).
Yes, I know “homophobia” doesn’t necessarily imply a literal phobia. But we all know what a “phobia” is—it’s an extreme, irrational, pathological fear of something—and it’s hard to completely escape that meaning when you talk about “homophobia.”
lissener: I don’t usually agree with you on much, but I think you hit the nail on the head this time. “Prejudice against gays” pretty much covers it.
While we’re nit-picking, I don’t think this is the correct way to view it. Raphael Lemkin coined the term modeling it after words like “fratricide” and “homicide”. I know some dictionaries quote the Indo-European root, but I don’t think that’s informative. Saying something is from an Indo-European root is rather meaningless since almost ALL of our words have Indo-European roots (including the Greek word genos). The -cide ending comes to us from the latin, -cida, killing.
Oikas. I apologize for the sarcasm; I’ve been Alt+Tabbing between this thread and a particularly heated pit thread for most of the day, and I got my tones mixed.
Let me rephrase: Magiver, no one is debating the definition of those words because they aren’t really ambiguous to most of us. In addition, perfectly acceptable definitions can be found in any current dictionary.
To have nearly reached something of a consensus on one word, only to have people who don’t agree with that near consensus lob in what appears pretty unquestionably to be a couple of strawmen–who’s really unclear on what those words mean?–stinks a little bit of sour grapes. At least, of defensiveness. IMHO.
