I met my dad at a burger king a while back and jumped in his car to hang out and eat a burger with him. My step mom proceeded to explain to me that Gays were what is wrong with America.
I asked her why she thought that and her answer was fragmented and made little sense, was basically "just because". (they don't know about me)
I personally believe people that hate or down gays are usually either ignorant or really religious and are told to hate gays as abominations to the lord : /. Perhaps its that in some groups we are easy targets and when you get a herd of "highly religious" people together they generally follow the leader and give each other support as each one takes their shot at people whom they likely never met or ever will. Its kinda like when you were in school, bullies would make fun of others to feel better about themselves. Logic be damned, "The biggest problem with America is all the gays!"
WhatsInAName Wrote:Ignorance
Fear of the unknown
Parental/tribal programming
Projecting a denial of their own homosexual feelings
The Church propaganda is the cause of all that.
Ignorance - they don't want you to ask questions and have doubts which is why they insist on blind fate. Ignorance originates from blind fate.
Fear of the unknown - same as ignorance. If you start asking questions, eventually they will implicate themselves with their own lies which will lead you to become sceptical. It's a lot easier to just claim evil whatever it is you don't know or don't understand.
Parental programming - brainwashing kids is the key weapon of the Church to keep its power over the masses. Brainwashed kids grow up, get married and then they start brainwashing their own kids and so on.
Projecting a denial of their own homosexual feelings - this too is caused by religion and it's a combination of all previous things.
Take the Church out of the equasion and you solve a world's problem.
Arch Linux, Core i7 4770, GTX 1660 Ti 6GB, 32GB DDR3 RAM home is where root is.
For the most part, it's just "us versus them." Humans evolved to be competitive towards out-groups. What a person considers to be their in-group and the out-group is determined by many factors, many of them predictable (race, class, nationality, religion, etc.).
Psychologists at Yale University conducted experiments on babies to see if they could see just how instinctive our morality is. Babies haven't been indoctrinated and brainwashed into our backwards culture, so they are perfect for studying human behavior. From this short video:
As you can see, there is evidence that humans have a natural instinct in determining right from wrong within one's own in-group, but also an instinctive animosity towards the out-group. If you watched the video, you would have seen how babies who have a preference for cereal or graham crackers over the other are likely to desire pain and suffering done to the puppet that has different tastes. It doesn't matter how arbitrary it is, as far as those babies at the Yale baby lab cared, the puppet that likes different treats needs to be smacked!
That's why people say homosexuals are evil - we like graham crackers, and they like cereal. It doesn't matter how stupidly arbitrary it is, it's just how we humans evolved - to hate the out-groups.
Of course, we humans are a species capable of rational thinking, so shouldn't we be above such primitive thinking? Well, not quite. With the rise of higher ordered human culture, one might think it would lead to the abolition of biases; but in fact, it has been the opposite.
That's where propaganda comes in. Homophobic people know being gay is harmless, so they do all sorts of mental gymnastics to convince themselves all gay people are rapists, or Satanists, or dark sorcerers, or whatever it is they like to jack off to.
I've observed what you described even in supposedly sweet little girls over the most stupid things. Like if some girls like Disney Channel they'll spread false rumors and hatefully cyberbully girls who prefer Nick (a different channel), and that's just one example of how bad it is. Watching them was when I realized our species was ultimately doomed (not that everyone does it, yet it's common enough and also frequently overlooked).