This has to be one of the more stupid news items I’ve come across recently (via InstaPundit):
[P]sychologists from the University of Arkansas claim that homophobia is not an actual phobia because it’s caused by disgust, not fear or anxiety.
Duh! We needed a study to tell us that the “phobia” part of “homophobia” is and probably has always been used figuratively?!
However, despite the “yeah, we knew that” nature of the study’s findings, I am troubled by the assertion that “fear or anxiety” don’t cause homophobia, but rather disgust. So disgust and “fear and anxiety” are mutually exclusive?
A fascinating array of heretofore unknown to me indexes or scales were marshalled to come to the study’s conclusion, including:
[…] the Index of Attitudes Toward Homosexuals (IAH), which measures homophobia; the Sexual Attitude Scale, which explores what people think about human sexuality; the Disgust Emotion Scale, which measures a person’s response level in terms of disgust; and the Padua Inventory, which assesses contamination obsessions[….]