People are forgetting how prevalent homosexual hatred used to be

[SCAdian]

@DMark

Making the rounds as a Morgan Freeman twitter quote (not true, as per Snopes) is a comment that is still funny and appropriate, regardless of who originally wrote it:
**
‘I hate the word homophobia. It’s not a phobia. You are not scared; you are an asshole.’**

pho·bi·a
n.

1. A persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous.
2. A strong fear, dislike, or aversion.

It’s a phobia.

[Hershele_Ostropoler]

@Weirofhermiston

It may be a peculiarly British aspect of the left but in the mid 70s when I was a student, the out there leftist position on gays was that it was a bourgeois deviation that come the revolution would simply cease to exist.

That said, individual members of the out there left were always good supporters of our campaigns. I suspect they knew as well as we did that no matter how many copies of Socialist Worker they sold around campus, the revolution was not coming any time soon and our campaigns were a good deal less dour than theirs.

It may also be like the anti-marriage pro-equality people today: the revolution will come eventually but it won’t come tomorrow and in the meantime, people are suffering. CP-USA’s website claims they take that approach.

[Czarcasm]

@SCAdian

pho·bi·a
n.

1. A persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous.
2. A strong fear, dislike, or aversion.

It’s a phobia.

How about homophobic asshole?

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

@Dallas_Jones

There weren’t any gay people in the '70s. Liberace wasn’t gay, Elton John wasn’t yet openly gay

Jack Tripper wasn’t gay, but was openly gay.

[Condescending_Robot]

@Annie-Xmas

If homosexual hatred isn’t so prevalent today, why is there such hatred over the idea of gay marriage..

Indeed. Dare I suggest that:

1. this board, which is almost lockstep mainstream Democratic Party/Obama supporters to the exclusion of both right-wing and hard-left viewpoints, is not representative of the country as a whole, and
2. with the inevitability of full equality for sexual minorities sooner or later, the fact that 100% of people in this thread claim to have been early adopters of the right viewpoints on this issue even as far back as the 1970s may be taken with a grain of salt.

[Malacandra]

@DMark

Making the rounds as a Morgan Freeman twitter quote (not true, as per Snopes) is a comment that is still funny and appropriate, regardless of who originally wrote it:
**
‘I hate the word homophobia. It’s not a phobia. You are not scared; you are an asshole.’**

I’m possibly wrong about this, in which case go ahead and educate me, but for the last few decades it’s seemed to me to have been mainly the gay and pro-gay side of the discussion that’s been hurling around the word homophobia as a pejorative. So if you now decide it’s an abuse of good grammar, by all means feel free to drop it, but I don’t in the name of good logic see how you get from there to “Actually it’s not a phobia at all! Schooled you!”.

It wasn’t just lesbians at women’s universities that were the big danger in the 1970s; just before I went off to uni my mother felt it necessary to warn me that homosexuals might try to pick me up and they could be “very persuasive”. That was probably more sex advice in one conversation than she’d given me during the rest of my adolescence, and as much use as tits on a bull. I already looked on the possibility of being hit on (in a civilised manner, of course) by a gay as something I could field with dignity and mutual respect, and in actual fact I have never been hit on by a gay in my life.

(The perv who tried to pick me up at the bus station when I was about 12 - 13 doesn’t count, and nor does the lavatory loiterer about three years later who decided to watch me under the partition from the next cubicle. I do know the difference.)