Homophobia

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17 May 2014

Language is very powerful tool. Naming a thing gives you power over that thing, to a certain degree. I recently stumbled across a facebook post of one of my daughters' friends attempting to humorously define a commonly used term:


"Homophobia: The fear that gay men will treat you how you treat women."


It acted like a catalyst in my mind crystallizing the hitherto somewhat nebulous belief that that word was somehow flawed. I have long been a proponent of the right of people to do what they want in their bedrooms without government interference. Likewise with contract law I don't believe that there should be any legal contracts which require one party to be male and one party to be female. I do not use the term homophobia or homophobic to describe those who disagree, however. Homophobia is a term designed to put people who disagree with homosexuality on the defensive by implying they have a mental disease, a "phobia". Until the late 1980's the DSM, the bible of psychiatry, classified homosexuality itself as a mental disease. We need to be better than that.

The reason that a teenager can make a joke of the term is that we can all inherently sense it is a lie. People who disagree with homosexuality do not have a mental disease, they have a different opinion. Children are often more adept at language than adults. When I was in middle school I remember being asked the trick question "Are you a homo?", the trick being that if I answered yes then they'd reply "You're a homosexual!" and if I answered no then they'd reply "You're not a homo sapien!" And yet so many adults have no problem adding the suffix "phobia" and using it to characterize those who disagree with them. As a polemic tactic it is quite well designed, because it deflects attention away from the real issue, homosexuality, and causes the accused to feel the need to defend their mental competence. I have seen the suffix applied elsewhere in the political sphere, e.g. Islamophobia, but the tactic is even more widespread.

This sort of mudslinging will only hinder the achievement of the cultural consensus which allow people of different sexual preferences to coexist. This consensus will no doubt be to the detriment of the news media, who will have to find something else to talk about. The fundamentalist christian cattlerancher and the atheist vegetarian lesbian may both think that the other lives a revolting, barbaric lifestyle, but both are wrong when they try to get the state to legislate away the other's freedom to live as they chose. Meat-eating and religion are no more mental diseases than homosexuality and disbelief are. They are differences of opinion, difference of lifestyle choices. Violence and oppression are the only way to force people to share, or pretend to share, your opinions.

I will never be able to get the whole world to agree that my opinions and lifestyle choices are the correct ones. Doubtless some of them are not. The only way to find those is through dialogue with those who have different opinions and have made different life choices. It is too easy to fall into a habit of confirmation bias, only listening to those with whom I already know I agree. The best way into honest dialogue is to find points of commonality and see where and why things diverged from there. I cannot do that by starting off asserting the other person has a mental disease, attacking the person rather than the issue. That is why I will not use the term homophobia. Hopefully I've convinced you to think twice before using it again either.


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Last change was on 20 May 2014 by Bradley James Wogsland.
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