> It's interesting how you, and most of the left, categorize all heterosexist
>> sentiment as a "phobia," and hence a psychological issue. I'll be the
>> first
>> to admit that I often err in the opposite direction - looking for the
>> material basis behind everything
>>
>
> This is rather opaque. What might the material basis behind a visceral
> dislike of homosexual behavior and perhaps homosexuals themselves - since
> you don't want to call it homophobia - be?
>
Doug, if you want to argue that something you dislike constitutes a psychological disorder in the clinical sense, the onus is on you to prove your case, not on me to preemptively disprove it.
But I'll go ahead and suggest that the material needs of previous societies, codified into surviving cultural and religious traditions, might have something to do with it. (Why many leftists are so eager to blame religion for everything - except those things for which it's obviously responsible, at least in part - I'll never know.)
You're playing another semantic game here, conflating every form of anti-homosexuality sentiment with "visceral dislike." Plenty of people dislike homosexuality on cultural, religious, or other grounds without being particularly visceral about it.
I quote Slavoj Žižek on the equally ludicrous pathologization of anti-Semitism:
"In the same way that the overriding belief underlying the Serbsky Institute's measures was that a person had to be *insane* to be against Communism, so Foxman's offer implies that a person has to be insane to be anti-Semitic. This easy way out enables us to avoid the key issue: that, precisely, anti-Semitism in our Western societies was - and is - not an ideology displayed by the deranged, but an ingredient of spontaneous ideological attitudes of perfectly *sane* people, of our ideological *sanity * itself."
-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."