by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
October 9, 2010
Homophobia has been around for a long time. It turns up in the Old Testament of the Bible as well as in the New. The Republican Religious Right relies on that view in support of its homophobia, and cites chapters and verses in support of it. (Not every religious scholar agrees with that interpretation of the Bible. Indeed, Minister Peter Gomes, the well-known gay [and African-American] Baptist long-time director of the Harvard Divinity School, strongly disagrees with it [see Gomes, P.J., “Homophobic? Re-read Your Bible,” New York Times, August 17, 1992, and Westminster, J., The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022, East Setauket, NY, Thomas Jefferson Press, 1996, pp.155-56]). In modern times it was used by the Nazis to promote their ideology once Hitler’s dictatorship had been established. Indeed, despite the fact that the head of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the most prominent pre-1933 Nazi armed force, Ernst Roehm, was himself homosexual and Hermann Goering was a cross-dresser, the Nazis went after the gays as their identity group of choice for demonization before they went after the Jews full force.
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