If we start at a young age and tell any child that he or she is bad, they are going to have a difficult time. We have all heard the Ricki Lake stories of the fat kids and the kids with lots of acne that got ridiculed and then they went on to have incredibly low self-esteem. I think homophobia is more pervasive than that.

We have reached a low in society, much like the days of the Jim Crow laws, where people are denied rights because of something they cannot change. Gay marriages, gay military involvement, gays in a crowed heterosexual bar: These are all the same signals of discrimination that we as a society have seen very recently. What is truly appalling is how many people actually participate in homophobia.

If you think about it, from the perspective of the heterosexual guy, the most offensive thing about homosexuality is the fear of being hit on, or the thought of anal sex. To these men I have but one parallel. Think of all the poor women who have endured the relentless drunken persistence of the desperate heterosexual. They have a well founded fear of date rape which actually occurs all too regularly. In this light, who should be afraid? The close minded men or the rightfully scared women.

From the perspective of heterosexual women, the most offensive thing happens to be the fear of the masculine. They fear that some butch dike is going to assault them. If this is truly the case we have to feel very sorry for the misplaced fear.

Of course people have arguments like they can't make good parents because they will make their kids gay and that their existence is a sin against God. Frankly I think many honest Christians would have said the same things about blacks in the very recent past and probably said the same about the Jews a long time ago. The business of hate is always one of the largest.