There are apparently people who believe that "homophobia" should be considered a psychological disease. These people should have their heads examined.
In fact, more study should be done on whether the urge to assign pathological status to people who politically with you is itself a pathology.
The term "homophobia" originally came into use by psychologists to refer to people who were in denial about their own homosexuality. Only in recent years has it come into use as a punitive political bullying term wielded against people who simply disagree, on religious or other grounds, with the condition or practice of homosexuality.
But the political and psychological use of the term together provide a nice little way for LGBT advocates to bully their opponents. How nice it is if you could just label people whose political or social positions you dislike as diseased.
This is also the essence of what the Southern Poverty Law Center does with its label of any socially conservative group as a "hate group."
But don't wait for the people who are always complaining about the "politicization of science" to complain about this. That's because the people who complain about the politicization of science are themselves politicized.
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G.K. Chesterton, writing over a hundred years ago:
"When the world next tries persecution seriously it will probably be under some new name or with some new excuse. There are many strictly modern things which could be used very easily as instruments for suppressing opinion. For instance- doctors. In these days we should not like to be so fanatical as to say that a man was wrong; but we should probably think nothing of saying that a man was mad, and treating him accordingly. If ever the Archbishop of Canterbury wishes to suppress General Booth, he will be very foolish if he used the cumbersome and antiquated language of intelligible philosophy or of historic Christianity. If he is wise he will take care to use, not the long words of Theology, but the long words of Science. He should not call him a Nestorian or Socinian; he should avoid all words in 'ian'; he should pick carefully, if possible, words ending in 'iac.' If he only called him a Nestoriac or a Sociniac, there would be something in the words that would make our scientific blood run cold. But it would be safer for him to say that General Booth was an advanced case of Soteritis (or diseased desire to save people), or that he was a pure case of Tympanomania (which means a morbid craving to walk behind a big drum.) Considering what a vast amount of solemn nonsense is talked in our time about the advance of psychology and mental experiment, and considering with what a ravenous simplicity it is all absorbed by the reading public, there seems no reason at all why this immense engine of pathological argument and medical coercion should not be put at the service of all the tyrants in the future. Instead of sending a man to prison for blasphemy, they will send him to the hospital for brain fever. If they want to put down Socialism, they will call it Irresponsible Promiscuity; if they want to put down individiualism, they will call it the malady of the Exaggerated Ego. This may be the new rule of Humanitarianism; and no tyranny like it has ever darkened the sky of men."
-March 30, 1907, "Illustrated London News"
Mike
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