aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, June 29, 2007

Bigotry and bias dressed up as wisdom

The Philadelphia Inquirer looks at what fuels homo hatred:

University of Pennsylvania psychologist and disgust expert Paul Rozin says it’s particularly a guy thing - most heterosexual men are disgusted by the thought of touching other men. Rozin recalls experiments in which researchers asked subjects how disgusted they’d be if a Q-tip that had been in the mouth of either a man or a woman was subsequently touched to their own various orifices.

Women didn’t care much whether the swab had touched the mouth of a man or a woman. But it mattered to men, who - surprise! - were not at all disgusted by the Q-tip that touched a woman but totally grossed out if they thought it had touched another guy’s tongue.... The moral compass of the religious right factors in that additional dimension of sanctity/purity, which is driven by disgust as well as religious teachings. [...]

“People used to think it was revolting when two people of different races got married,” Caplan says. Letting your sense of disgust guide your views on gay marriage, he adds, “is just bigotry and bias dressed up with the clothes of wisdom.”

Via Stephen H. Miller.