Thinkage

"Bizzle’s rap contains all the usual anti-gay bugaboos: gays are uncontrollably lusty; they’re like pedophiles; they violate God’s rules and summon his wrath; they trounce my religious freedom to persecute them; and now they’re becoming violent—oh, but by the way, while I hate their sin, I love them and just pray they’ll become straight like me.  Indeed, what’s most marked about today’s homophobia is what a clear expression of narcissism it is, along with how unrigorous its rationalizations are.  Homophobic people seem unable to see past themselves, to transcend their most rudimentary emotions and arrive at a place that’s often reachable only if we apply a modicum of reason—often spurred by empathy—to challenge old mental habits.

"Instead, homophobes assume that the only natural way of being, for everyone, is straight like them.  The late philosopher and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl once wrote that those with narcissistic prejudice 'cannot tolerate the idea that there exist people not like them.'  It’s a telling diagnosis, given how freely anti-gay thought characterizes gay people (as opposed to anti-gay people) as narcissistic—presumably an artifact of the Freudian notion that homosexuality stems from a developmental block in the path from self-love to love of others.  Borrowing another concept from psychoanalysis, homophobes may be especially likely to project their own narcissism onto others as a way to deflect taking responsibility for their own issues." -- Nathaniel Frank, The Narcissism of Today’s Homophobia