I know JWB is bi and I didn'T call him homophobic for the record, I think it has more to do with the common fallacy of applying linear relationships in social mechanisms.
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Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
nope. all i have questioned is arguments that seem less than convincing to me. mostly because i know that if i don't play devil's advocate here, nobody will. it's just not socially acceptable to do so. people are too afraid of appearing hateful. but for the record, i never said 'homophobia doesn't cause mental illness' or anything remotely close to that.
if you say so... that just doesn't seem self evident to me. i mean would you extend that logic to a scenario where 15 are homos, 1 is homophobic, and the rest are complacent? you'd expect homosexuals to be just as affected by 1 man's homophobia as they would if it were a relatively popular sentiment? that just sounds counter-intuitive to me.
or to bring it back to the real world... a gay man living in san fran vs a gay man living in saudi arabia.. you think they would be equally closeted and repressed?
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I don't think it's a constant for all m, where m is the number of homophobes. I said it was not linear (it's also not one dimensional). The difference between Saudi Arabia and San Francisco is one's a country with systemic national support of homophobia (with regards to both policy and religion) and the other is a city in a state in a country. The number of violent/abusive homophobes is certainly a factor, but the availability of support (from legalization of gay marriage to local family/friend support) goes a long way to reduce the marginalization that could lead to isolation and persecution that could lead to mental illness.
Further, the impact of having a violently homophobic father on mental illness would be more than that of someone who had a supportive family but got beat up once by a homophobe. A single homophobe in each of these cases has a different impact based on their relationship to the victim.