What joy do homophobic people find when they’re being homophobic?

Not… feeling it with these answers. Not putting themselves enough in the homophobe’s shoes, I believe.

I think Sophia de Tricht’s is the closest to the answer I’m about to offer, but her answer was pretty epigrammatic.

Consider this: Habib Fanny’s answer to Why do social conservatives care if gay people can marry or trans people can change their names? If they claim to be against government intervention, why don’t they just leave people alone?

A closely related question. From someone who (as Clarissa Lohr just put it to me in a different context) is a bridge: Habib has been on both sides of a culturally divisive issue. And he’s not even invoking God here.

The idea is that these issues are not a matter of identity but a matter of deviancy. Deviancy must be checked because otherwise a society loses its moral compass. And the loss of a moral compass is the death knell of a society. I mean, look at Rome! They were so deviant that they ran their entire civilization into the ground.

Of course, all of this is bollocks. It’s nothing more than people imposing their own narrow-minded sense of morality on an entire population on the pretense that civilization would otherwise collapse. But I hope you understand the thought process behind it a bit better after reading this.

What joy do homophobic people find when they’re being homophobic?

They think they’re saving the world.

Are you scratching your head and muttering? Go ahead. But if you want to know what a homophobe gets out of homophobia, surely you have to get inside their head.