charleslb
02/07/12, 06:50 pm
Are gays insidious immoralists who are blatantly bent on destructing the socially-undergirding ethos and mores of Western civilization by detonating a cultural H-bomb – "H" in this case standing not for hydrogen but rather for homosexual acceptance? That is, does the tolerance & equality-promoting agenda of LGBT activists ultimately aim at creating a post-heterosexual society in which non-straights enjoy a privileged and socially-dominant status that allows them to impose their "lifestyle" on everyone else?
Well, of course this is just fundamentalist folderol and rightist rubbish. Of course there's no grand conspiratorial agenda aiming at establishing a repressive homosexual hegemony. I'll state this up front and a priorily because I don't intend to dignify such wingnutty fears by running down all the various the facts that refute them. What I'm more interested in is the roots of the conservative canard that gays are out to subvert and take over our culture. Indeed, why is it that it's such a prevalent notion and anxiety on the right that homosexuals are trying to dominate the rest of us?
Certainly card-carrying Christianists and conservatives subscribe to and explicitly express such gay-bashing bunk about LGBTers aspiring to culturally conquer the world. And certainly we've all heard this same homophobic humbug voiced by friends and co-workers in the form of the following comment: "What I don't like is the way gays try to shove their lifestyle on us, the way they get in our face with it". The belief that them there deviants want to dominate is out there and all too widely held. But why?
Is it just simply homophobia? Isn't that perhaps all there is to it? No doubt homophobia is one large causal component in the makeup of the mental distress suffered by traditional values types concerning homosexuality in general, and concerning the threat of a homosexual cultural takeover in particular. But it also seems fairly obvious that there's a bit more going on in the psyches of folks who feel that gays are forcing their abnormality on us all.
For one thing, insecurity. And no, I do not mean insecurity about one's own heterosexuality. Let's not be so crass. Rather, I mean a more generalized, underlying insecure concern that others are trying to force their opinions and will upon us. Many people simply suffer from such an inner insecurity and defensiveness that's piqued when confronted with the strength of conviction and political assertiveness of someone on the opposite of an issue. And of course such inner insecurity and defensiveness is also subject to being piqued by the activism and "stridency" of some in the gay community.
What I'll call the insecure response, however, is not very self-honest. That is, it produces rationalization rather than self-criticism. When individuals experience this response they usually externalize it and blame homosexuals for provoking it. They put an interpretation on it in which gays are portrayed as pushing their "perversion" on straight society. In this self-deceptive interpretation the discomfort that a straight person feels isn't a product of his/her own insecurity, it's just a reasonable reaction to the excessive overtness of "flamboyant gays". This in turn feeds into one's resentment and hostility regarding homosexuals, sometimes producing a staunchly anti-gay attitude based on nothing more than the aggravation of one's personal insecurity issues.
Which is all to say that it's not so much anything about homosexuality per se that causes some homophobes to experience the illusory sense of being under siege by out-of-the-closet gays and their political efforts to gain equal rights, it's the homophobe's own weak ego spinning things so that homosexuals become aggressive, overweening, and threatening opponents.
Let go a bit deeper now. Such ego weakness, i.e. the type of insecurity that makes individuals excessively sensitive to having the values & views of others foisted upon them, can of course be due to a combination of factors. But one that stands out, especially in the case of anti-gay conservatives, is a social dominance-oriented mentality. Now then, having a social dominance-oriented mentality doesn't always mean what you might think, it doesn't always mean having a domineering personality; it simply means having a mind-set that's fundamentally oriented toward thinking in terms of dominance-weighted dualities such as strength and weakness, being successful or being a loser, superiority and inferiority, and of course dominance and deference.
And naturally of course such a mentality also tends to make one overly keen about one's own dominance status and about not being dominated by others. Keen to the point of insecurity. Insecurity about even such things as someone with a differing point of view or sexual orientation being too assertive in expressing it. Mm-hmm, an individual with a distinct dominance-oriented streak in his/her psyche will in fact be quite prone to interpreting the opinionatedness or passion or colorfulness of others as militancy and as their attempt to subject him/her to whatever they happen to represent.
Sorry conservatives, but at the core of your cognitive constitution is precisely this social dominance orientation and the insecurity it conduces to. And this most certainly goes a long way toward explaining the conservative's subjective feeling that "liberals" and gays are trying to press their "agenda" on society. Add to this the fact that people with a pronounced dominance-oriented mentality tend to engage in projection, i.e. tend to attribute their own domineering tendencies to their opponents, and it's no wonder that conservatives experience progressives and homosexuals as arrogantly bent on cultural hegemony.
In the case of some extreme right-wing individuals such fear of being subject to the dominance of gays & progressives takes on almost clinical proportions, becomes downright paranoid. For example, we find this to be the obvious case with Anders Breivik, whose anti-left, anti-Muslim psyche last year went off the paranoid deep end and perpetrated mass murder in Norway. Clearly he is someone whose politics mask profound personal, psychological issues and a need to assert his power & dominance. But although Mr. Breivik is a rather heinous example, although most conservatives aren't quite so far gone, they nonetheless share his basic mental orientation.
To summarize and recap, in criminology we find the term "power-dominance rapist"; well, I would go so far as to suggest that a similar term, power-dominance rightist, would aptly apply to the typical conservative (although I suppose it's a tad redundant). The power-dominance rightist has an unconscious guardedness and insecurity about being dominated by others, particularly progressives, and a tendency to ascribe his/her own power-dominance orientation to others, which makes him/her subjectively interpret the irrepressible openness of some gays and the zeal of some on the liberal side for creating a more just society as domineering and despotic. This conservative interpretation of the behavior of homosexuals and leftists is of course entirely grounded in psychology and not at all in facts. Moreover, when power-dominance rightists succumb to the easily enraged emotivity of their orientation they can become atrocity-perpetrators, à la Anders Breivik or the individuals in this country who commit hate crimes against Arabs or abortion doctors or gays. Beware the power-dominance rightist, beware the conservative mentality.
The conclusion is located directly below
Well, of course this is just fundamentalist folderol and rightist rubbish. Of course there's no grand conspiratorial agenda aiming at establishing a repressive homosexual hegemony. I'll state this up front and a priorily because I don't intend to dignify such wingnutty fears by running down all the various the facts that refute them. What I'm more interested in is the roots of the conservative canard that gays are out to subvert and take over our culture. Indeed, why is it that it's such a prevalent notion and anxiety on the right that homosexuals are trying to dominate the rest of us?
Certainly card-carrying Christianists and conservatives subscribe to and explicitly express such gay-bashing bunk about LGBTers aspiring to culturally conquer the world. And certainly we've all heard this same homophobic humbug voiced by friends and co-workers in the form of the following comment: "What I don't like is the way gays try to shove their lifestyle on us, the way they get in our face with it". The belief that them there deviants want to dominate is out there and all too widely held. But why?
Is it just simply homophobia? Isn't that perhaps all there is to it? No doubt homophobia is one large causal component in the makeup of the mental distress suffered by traditional values types concerning homosexuality in general, and concerning the threat of a homosexual cultural takeover in particular. But it also seems fairly obvious that there's a bit more going on in the psyches of folks who feel that gays are forcing their abnormality on us all.
For one thing, insecurity. And no, I do not mean insecurity about one's own heterosexuality. Let's not be so crass. Rather, I mean a more generalized, underlying insecure concern that others are trying to force their opinions and will upon us. Many people simply suffer from such an inner insecurity and defensiveness that's piqued when confronted with the strength of conviction and political assertiveness of someone on the opposite of an issue. And of course such inner insecurity and defensiveness is also subject to being piqued by the activism and "stridency" of some in the gay community.
What I'll call the insecure response, however, is not very self-honest. That is, it produces rationalization rather than self-criticism. When individuals experience this response they usually externalize it and blame homosexuals for provoking it. They put an interpretation on it in which gays are portrayed as pushing their "perversion" on straight society. In this self-deceptive interpretation the discomfort that a straight person feels isn't a product of his/her own insecurity, it's just a reasonable reaction to the excessive overtness of "flamboyant gays". This in turn feeds into one's resentment and hostility regarding homosexuals, sometimes producing a staunchly anti-gay attitude based on nothing more than the aggravation of one's personal insecurity issues.
Which is all to say that it's not so much anything about homosexuality per se that causes some homophobes to experience the illusory sense of being under siege by out-of-the-closet gays and their political efforts to gain equal rights, it's the homophobe's own weak ego spinning things so that homosexuals become aggressive, overweening, and threatening opponents.
Let go a bit deeper now. Such ego weakness, i.e. the type of insecurity that makes individuals excessively sensitive to having the values & views of others foisted upon them, can of course be due to a combination of factors. But one that stands out, especially in the case of anti-gay conservatives, is a social dominance-oriented mentality. Now then, having a social dominance-oriented mentality doesn't always mean what you might think, it doesn't always mean having a domineering personality; it simply means having a mind-set that's fundamentally oriented toward thinking in terms of dominance-weighted dualities such as strength and weakness, being successful or being a loser, superiority and inferiority, and of course dominance and deference.
And naturally of course such a mentality also tends to make one overly keen about one's own dominance status and about not being dominated by others. Keen to the point of insecurity. Insecurity about even such things as someone with a differing point of view or sexual orientation being too assertive in expressing it. Mm-hmm, an individual with a distinct dominance-oriented streak in his/her psyche will in fact be quite prone to interpreting the opinionatedness or passion or colorfulness of others as militancy and as their attempt to subject him/her to whatever they happen to represent.
Sorry conservatives, but at the core of your cognitive constitution is precisely this social dominance orientation and the insecurity it conduces to. And this most certainly goes a long way toward explaining the conservative's subjective feeling that "liberals" and gays are trying to press their "agenda" on society. Add to this the fact that people with a pronounced dominance-oriented mentality tend to engage in projection, i.e. tend to attribute their own domineering tendencies to their opponents, and it's no wonder that conservatives experience progressives and homosexuals as arrogantly bent on cultural hegemony.
In the case of some extreme right-wing individuals such fear of being subject to the dominance of gays & progressives takes on almost clinical proportions, becomes downright paranoid. For example, we find this to be the obvious case with Anders Breivik, whose anti-left, anti-Muslim psyche last year went off the paranoid deep end and perpetrated mass murder in Norway. Clearly he is someone whose politics mask profound personal, psychological issues and a need to assert his power & dominance. But although Mr. Breivik is a rather heinous example, although most conservatives aren't quite so far gone, they nonetheless share his basic mental orientation.
To summarize and recap, in criminology we find the term "power-dominance rapist"; well, I would go so far as to suggest that a similar term, power-dominance rightist, would aptly apply to the typical conservative (although I suppose it's a tad redundant). The power-dominance rightist has an unconscious guardedness and insecurity about being dominated by others, particularly progressives, and a tendency to ascribe his/her own power-dominance orientation to others, which makes him/her subjectively interpret the irrepressible openness of some gays and the zeal of some on the liberal side for creating a more just society as domineering and despotic. This conservative interpretation of the behavior of homosexuals and leftists is of course entirely grounded in psychology and not at all in facts. Moreover, when power-dominance rightists succumb to the easily enraged emotivity of their orientation they can become atrocity-perpetrators, à la Anders Breivik or the individuals in this country who commit hate crimes against Arabs or abortion doctors or gays. Beware the power-dominance rightist, beware the conservative mentality.
The conclusion is located directly below