In Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America, Michael Nava & Robert Dawidoff write:
The decision to regard homosexuality as a species of alien behavior, and to punish it, makes a law of the majority’s personal taste and habits. For most people, the “sin” of homosexuality is a question of taste. The question embarrasses people not because they can’t imagine it, but because they can and do.
The revulsion many men and women feel at the thought of sexual activity between people of their own sex remains a formidable obstacle on the path of gay rights. This revulsion, which we call the Ick Factor, equates distaste with immorality. It is a child’s vision of life, in which the things one wants to do are natural, and the things one doesn’t want to do are matters of morality: “I don’t like it; it’s bad.”
People’s objections to homosexuality are not intellectual. It’s not like someone who objects to communism because they sincerely believe that capitalism is a better economic system while communism inevitably reduces freedom, opportunity, and happiness. Justified or mistaken, such opposition is intellectual in nature.
People’s objections to homosexuality aren’t even just religious, though religious ideology plays an important role in this. Deep down, people’s objection to homosexuality appear to be a revulsion at homosexual acts themselves. People are able to imagine what they are like and, being horrified, seek to ensure that they don’t occur.
Religion serves to rationalize and justify this revulsion, but in the end people are disgusted at the idea of people engaging in certain kinds of sexual acts. Normalizing homosexuality, much less same-sex marriage, would ultimately send the message that there is nothing wrong with those acts and that’s not something which many people are willing to accept.
Should disgust form the basis for laws which control other people’s behavior? No. Some have defended disgust as a basis for laws on the theory that disgust tells us something about fundamental social norms, but that’s just a circular argument. Others have defended disgust on the theory that it tells us something about human nature, something outside socialization and social customs. That’s not even plausible, much less persuasive. Some have even argued that the experience of disgust is itself a type of harm which the law should prevent.
At one time, people experienced disgust at seeing interracial relationships, interfaith relationships, and living near racial or religious minorities. Their disgust was no less real than the disgust people experience today at the thought of gay couples — but was that disgust a reasonable basis for anti-miscegenation laws or housing discrimination? Of course not. There is far less disgust at such things today precisely because the laws were overturned and people were socialized to think differently about such situations.
Thus, it’s true that normalizing homosexuality and gay marriage would send the message that there is nothing wrong with them — at least, nothing wrong from the standpoint of civil law. People would be free to continue experiencing disgust and revulsion at gays and gay relationships, but as people are socialized not to regard their gay neighbors as aliens, such disgust and revulsion will become just as much a minority viewpoint as disgust at interracial marriages is today.
Read More Book Notes from the Book Reviews on this site.
It may not be the Ick! response but the Ooh! response. In one of my texts, Aronson, the author, refers to several experiments on self-justification. One of many gems is this one:
… it would follow that those individuals who fear that they may be sexually attracted to members of their own sex might be among those most prone to develop antigay attitudes. In an interesting experiment, Henry Adams and his colleagues showed a group of men a series of sexually explicit erotic video tapes consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian encounters while measuring their sexual arousal (actual changes in their penile circumference). Although almost all of the men showe increases in sexual arousal while watching the heterosexual and lesbian videos, it was the men with the most negative attitudes toward male homosexuals who were the most aroused by the videos depicting male homosexual love-making. (The Social Animal, Ninth Edition, p.162)
Aronson remarks that “[o]ne thing [the experimental results] suggests is that the most zealous opponents of a given position are not those who have always been distant from that position. … People who almost decide to live in glass houses are frequently the ones who are most prone to throw stones.”
As Jon Stewart has said on The Daily Show, “Gay people … look no further than the anti-gay buffet.”
So your argument is that if you are disgusted by gay behavior, you must be secretly gay yourself. The argument is stupid and self-serving, an attempt to silence critics of the norming of homosexuality.
Jon Stewart is a leftist ideologue and his opinion means little to me.
No, but it is a fact that homophobia correlates highly with homosexual feelings – scientific studies have proven it.
Not at all – just to pull the truth out of the closet.
Yeah, but what do you think of his cute smile – does it turn you on?
Homosexuality is already normal as in naturally occurring (or “god given” if you prefer). Making it out to be some sort of affront or aberration is the problem. That’s ignorant, unnecessarily divisive and destroys lives. And besides … it’s been repeatedly proven wrong.