Homophobia: The Result of Emotional Deficiencies

From my interaction and communications (often via e-mail debates) with some prominent homophobes - Robert Knight (pictured at left - I still have numerous e-mails from him), Peter LaBarbera and Stephen Bennett to name a few - I have always been struck by the sense that these individuals are a bit too shrill and borderline hysterical in their homophobia. Stated differently, I have often felt it is more than religious beliefs that are driving the intensity of their attacks on LGBT Americans. I've even thought that some of these individuals - Robert Knight is one such example - are tortured, self-hating closet cases who transfer their own self-hatred towards gays who have achieved spiritual peace with their sexual orientation. Now a new book, The Passionate State of Mind And Other Aphorisms, by Eric Hoffer offers some interesting perspectives on extreme homophobes. Here are some highlights via Gay Agenda:

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And it is to this phenomenon every person who possesses both a critical intellect and the necessary emotion of “compassion” must turn to help understand why there are some homophobes who make their homophobia something like a career. So many spend an inordinate amount of time condemning God’s LGBT children, and one must understand that their animus ultimately resides, not in the object of their hatred, but in their own psyches that betrays their blemishes, crippled natures, incompleteness, and insecurities.

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After all, if someone is emotionally and sexually intact, why would there be a need for their obsessive condemnation of other consenting adults’ emotional/sexual orientations? How is same-sex marriage, for example, going to adversely affect anyone’s heterosexual marriage? Is there anyone who can give a reasonable answer to that question? Clearly, there can be no rational answer to that rhetorical question! If anything, same-sex marriage will enhance the institution of marriage!

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Yet, we have many religious (and secular) people who try and prevent same-sex couples from partaking of the very institution from which they benefit, thereby encouraging fornication as one of their prejudices’ by products, and they even have the temerity to claim the right to discriminate in the name of God. So, would they have us believe that God would prefer fornication over marriage among Gay people?

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The irrationality of homophobic rhetoric shows a clear deficiency on the part of homophobes regarding their level of “compassion,” as it does their clear dissatisfaction with their own lot in life! Why else spend such an inordinate amount of time thinking about and condemning the emotional/sexual lives of others?

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Emotionally and sexually intact people aren’t particularly concerned with the emotional and sexual lives of other adults! They are likely to have a “live and let live” approach to such matters! However, when someone has an inordinate fascination with condemning others, that condemnation betrays an emotional deficiency that makes compassion very difficult, if not impossible, to have or sustain.

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[T]hose who condemn others, those who seek to deprive others of civil rights, those who help create a climate of fear and hatred of others, have shown by their words and/or deeds that they are neither Christians nor even decent people! We are to make no mistake: homophobes are absolutely no different in their mind-set and in their emotional deficiencies than were and are White Supremacists! Both groups partake of the need to discriminate and hate in order for the awareness of their own emotional deficiencies to be overridden by their condemnation of others!

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Jesus never condemned Gay people, but He sure spent quite a bit of time condemning the proud, the haughty, the legalists who condemned and discriminated against others and put yokes of bondage onto others, all the while claiming to impose those yokes in the name of God. If haters didn’t have an object to hate, they would be forced to confront their own emotional blemishes, crippled natures, incompleteness, insecurities, deficiencies and frailties. And that is the last thing a moral coward feels he/she can afford to do!