The desire to be with people you’re attracted to is indeed something that should be acted on. Is this controversial?
A history of terrible relations doesn’t change who a person is attracted to. I could have had a lifetime of terrible relations with women, but I wouldn’t start dating men. (not that there’s anything wrong with that)
No one, as far as I can tell.
But if one (or more) of my daughters told me they were lesbian, I would support them 100%. Why not?
we should neither act on them all nor deny them all but that doesn’t advance the argument one jot.
:eek:
I had some appalling relations with women and you know what?..it never made me think "oooo! I’d love some cock instead!
Decision? Sexuality isn’t a decision you make, it is who you are. By all means disapprove of the behaviours displayed by your children’s partners but I don’t see how “being female” falls into that category.
The word “Homophobic” is an insult. You may choose to interpret it literally or figuratively, but either way it’s still an insulting term used as an insult.
Just like “nigger lover” is an insult. You may choose to use it literally or figuratively, but either way it’s an insult.
So the question is, are you comfortable using an insulting term to describe the parents? Or do you want to try to find a value-neutral term? Or even a term of approval?
If you feel that the behavior of the parents is sufficiently wrong/sinful/immoral that it deserves/requires an insulting description, then “homophobic” is one that is available.
It doesn’t make sense to parse insults to find what they “really” mean.
Maintaining oneself in such ignorance in 21st-century America would take considerable effort. I call bullshit on the so-called ignorance. You’d have to be grossly homophobic, and therefore determined to remain “ignorant”, in order to accomplish such a weird goal.
A truthful accusation is not necessarily an insult.
Homophobic is a simple descriptor for someone with a dislike of or prejudice against gay people (Oxford English dictionary definition). You may choose to find it insulting, but in itself it isn’t an insult.
Going by the above definition, I would say, yes, the father is homophobic - he thinks it’s a choice, and he doesn’t want this daughter to be so. He’s clearly demonstrating prejudice.
And you are right to do so. But it’s not benign. If she’s gay she’s gay; if she’s bi-sexual, she’s bi-sexual; if she’s straight, she’s straight. And the acquaintance needs to respect that.
I think it’s homophobic; then again, I find that the very notion of homosexuality as a choice is homophobic in that it assumes that people who have ‘chosen’ to be homosexual in situations in which it could get them beaten, insulted, raped, killed… were too stupid to realize it. It’s an insult to the intelligence of queers.
And even then, it’s not as if people go and say “you know what, I’ve decided I’ll go fall in love with XYZ.” Bisexual and pansexual mean you may be attracted to people with multiple gynecological configurations: it doesn’t mean you choose what to have today as if deciding what to put on your pizza.
It’s obviously not homophobic. If it were homophobic, the rationale would be “being gay is wrong” or “being gay is unnatural” or something of that ilk.
Instead, the rationale is “being gay will cause your life to be harder and, because I love you, I want your life to be as easy as possible”. At worst, it’s teaching the child a bad lesson – that it’s better to pretend to be someone you’re not in order to avoid conflict – but it’s certainly not homophobic.
As a second point (sorry mods, I cannot seem to edit my previous post):
We would definitely benefit from being more expansive with our vocabulary when discussing these issues. This should be obvious when you consider that we use the same term, ‘phobia’ when referring to a fear of spiders and when referring to someone who hates gay people. They are completely different emotions, and represent completely different positions regarding spiders/gays.
If we were to distinguish fear (phobia) from hatred (misos), it would make discussions much more logical for the benefit of all those involved.
However, I feel it important to reiterate my point that the person in your example is displaying neither fear nor hatred; they are making a prediction about society’s treatment of their daughter based on her life choices.
Yes he is, he’s afraid that life as a homosexual will be hard. That’s fear of homosexuality, even if you try to dress it up as actually afraid of life difficulties. You think he’s worried if she chooses a challenging university course, like Dr or Engineer? It will surely be harder than other choices.
He’s not afraid of those life challenges, just the ones relating to homosexuality. Especially lame today in 2018, when there has never been a more open or liberal attitude to homosexuality. If this was the 1920’s he’d have a point…maybe. Not that there aren’t challenges and difficulties for those in the community, there clearly still are.
He’s just trying to dress up his homophobia as something else. With the same overworked argument parents have used to deter mixed marriages of all kinds since the beginning of time. It was always unfounded fear/bigotry disguised as concern for life challenges.
Does he imagine she’s unaware of the challenges? No, but he’d rather decide for her, that the challenges of hiding your gay, are less than the challenge of being openly gay. I’m not buying it for a minute. He just doesn’t want his kid to be gay, but won’t come out and say so, I believe.
Straight up homophobia on display for all to see. He may delude himself, but no one else I suspect, is gonna buy it.
Being afraid your child is going to be harmed by other people because your child is homosexual is not homophobic - it’s still true to some extent and was even more true in the past.
What would be homophobic is trying to change your child’s sexual orientation in order to “protect” your child.
As an analogy - imagine a parent afraid his child will be raped because she’s female. That’s, unfortunately, a risk in this world. That’s not misogynist. What would be misogynist is trying to make your daughter into a son to “protect” her from rape. That would be appalling. So is trying to make a homosexual into a heterosexual.
That’s called being Bi. You can and do form romantic relations with members of either sex. People just hate that designation because of the push-back they get form both straight and homosexual individuals and so call themselves either gay or straight, depending on who they are in a relationship with.
Ummm… yes. In fact most of the time we should not act on that. There are many, many, many people in this world that we are attracted to. For most of those people, we should not act on it or we end up at best being like creepy construction workers and at worst, we end up as serial rapists. As someone who is married, I should NEVER act on a desire to be with someone I’m attracted to other than to my wife. If I’m walking down the street and see a 21 year old co-ed in a miniskirt that I may have a desire to be with, I think that many if not most people would say, ‘Ignore that base impulse and remember that you’re married to a wonderful woman and have two great kids. Acting on your desire is immoral and foolish.’ If I were a single man and I meet a wonderful girl who I am attracted to and ask her out and she says, “No thank you. I’m just not that into you.” Despite my continued desire and attraction, I think that many people would say that the correct course of action is to suppress that desire and cease to act on it. She made her preference clear and you should respect that.
I’m not attempting to make an argument that homosexuals should suppress their desires, that’s out of the scope of this argument. I AM saying that it’s certainly not noncontroversial that our desires and attractions should be acted on.
I think that the base of the problem is that we don’t have a good word for prejudice against homosexuals. Homophobic originated as a slur implying that all dislike or prejudice of homosexuals was rooted in some sort of fear, but that’s clearly not always the case. We never got around to making a word like ‘sexism’ or ‘racism’ to define that antipathy, so we’re stuck with a word whose connotation is ‘prejudiced against homosexuals,’ but its denotation is ‘afraid of homosexuals.’ I think that your friend is right that his behavior is not ‘homophobic’ in the denotative sense, but in the connotative sense it likely is.
I had that hypothetical thought - that it would be easier to “fit in”. If I had a magic wand would I make my offspring straight? No, I’d use my magic wand to make society tolerant.
… And that is a perfectly good reason for the father to say “You know, some people are probably not going to treat you as well when they find out.” And for the daughter to say “Yeah, I know that.” And that’s the end of the conversation, when the father isn’t homophobic but just concerned.
Not from the speakers point of view, certainly. Which example wasn’t necessarily an insult?
Saying that a homophobic person is homophobic, to his face.
I don’t understand the people who insist on parsing the “-phobia” ending as always literally denoting “fear” just because that’s what the Greek root meant thousands of years ago; that’s not the way language works. Compare photophobia (irritation of the eye caused by bright light), hydrophobia (old-school word for rabies), etc., none of which imply “fear” of the thing in question. “Homophobia” is built upon the same construction as “xenophobia” (prejudice against foreigners).
“Homophobia” is not “a slur” any more than “racist” is. The word was coined in the 1960’s by a psychologist to describe exactly what it means now: prejudice against homosexuality. (Apparently an earlier writer suggested the term “homoerotophobia” for this concept, which we may be thankful did not take…).