Over at Pam’s House Blend, the Homophobia Is A Made-Up Word argument rises grimly once more from its grave, and starts eating brains…

Words have meaning. Henceforth, I shall make a reasonable effort to eliminate "homophobia" and "homophobic" from my vocabulary.

The word "homophobia" suggests that the intolerant are afflicted; It follows that a treatable pathology can be associated with the condition. Moreover, the implication is that this condition represents an irrational fear like "acrophobia," a fear of heights or "zoophobia," a fear of animals. How about "pogonophobia" which is a fear of beards?

Hey…how about lexophobia, which is fear of dictionaries?  Okay…I just made that one up.  But a lot of people suffer from it.  

Yeah words have meaning.  And homophobia is a perfectly useful word that takes its meaning from another word, xenophobia, and applies it to homosexuals rather then foreigners or strangers.  Here is xenophobia:

xenophobia
noun

Etymology:
    New Latin
Date:
    1903

Fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.
 

The word homophobia simply replaces strangers or foreigners with homosexuals in the definition.  The meaning is the same, it just refers to a different class or category of people who are the object of the fear and/or hatred.  Simple, no?

Apparently not.  This isn’t complicated.  Yes, the words phobic and phobia do not have that meaning, but the motherfucking suffixes can!  Learn to read a dictionary and look up the goddamned suffix!  There is nothing wrong with the usage of the suffix in the word homophobia. 

This argument makes me want to scream whenever I hear it.  How about hydrophobic?  That’s a molecule that does not bind with water.  How can a molecule have an irrational fear of water?  Tell a chemist that they should eliminate that word from their vocabulary because a molecule cannot have fear, irrational or otherwise.  Or hydrophobia…which is another term for rabies.  There’s thermophobic, which is intolerance for high temperatures by either inorganic material or organisms.  Or photophobia…which is hypersensitivity to light?  There are a lot of words like these, that do not refer exclusively or even partially to irrational fear.

The argument that homophobia just means an irrational fear of homosexuals is another one of those cute little rhetorical ploys that bigots throw out there to confuse people.  They do that.  They will always do that.  Accepting their definitions for words and terms and employing others you only think makes the concept more clear doesn’t buy you anything because they will simply redefine those new words and terms too.  And they’ll keep on doing that. 

How…just how…do you spend Any time in this fight without knowing that, as a matter of fact no, the other side actually does Not want to make the meaning of things clear?  Do you just sleepwalk through the culture war?  Look at how they redefine the word homosexual for chrissake.  On the one hand, there is no such thing as a homosexual because it is a leaned behavior we could all stop engaging in if we wanted to.  There are no homosexuals, there is only homosexuality.  On the other hand, the homosexual agenda threatens the very fabric of western civilization, and militant homosexuals want to destroy the nuclear family.  Yes words have meaning.  And to the culture warriors that meaning is whatever they need it to be at any given moment.  They don’t want to make anything clear.  They don’t want you to understand their point of view.  They aren’t arguing in good faith.  They never argue in good faith.  They want to win.

We don’t have to help them by letting them turn every converstation about gay people into a game of Calvinball.  Homophobia is a perfectly legitimate word that describes a particular kind of bigotry.  When one of those bigots starts yap, yap, yapping that they’re not a homophobe because they aren’t afraid of homosexuals, smack them upside the head with a dictionary and show them their photograph next to the word Bigot.