2. A RIGHT TO HATE?

There is a movement underway in North America today, a wave of anti-Gay sentiment, sometimes described as a ‘backlash’ against the recent progress of Gay and Lesbian persons to achieve civil rights and liberties on an equal basis with other citizens. What is behind this ‘backlash’? Is it entirely an orchestrated political manifestation of the extreme religious right? Or is there something more fundamental, more darkly sinister at the root of these outbursts?
There is a rather common personality type, which has been described by a variety of terms by a variety of researchers over the years, but that has two main and very distinctive traits;
- an overwhelming need to feel in control, not only of themselves, but of everything and everyone around them.
- an inability to accept responsibility for their own faults, weaknesses, and failures, and a need to cast blame onto someone else when things go wrong.

For the moment, we will term these personalities - Scapegoating Control Freaks - (SCFs). Life has not been easy for these individuals and their clone-like offspring since the end of WW2. Revelations about the Death Camps and the role of anti-semitism in creating an atmosphere in which they could exist, took away the "right" to hate Jews and practice discrimination against them for many of the SCFs. Where once it was socially acceptable to hate Jews and to blame them for all of life's problems, it now became socially unacceptable. Things got even worse for the SCFs when the Civil Rights movement came along in the 60's - now it was unacceptable to hate Blacks and blame them for all their problems (or to hate Whites - if you happened to be a SCF of color). And then the Women's Movement came along, and it became unacceptable to be openly misogynistic and more and more difficult to dominate and unquestioningly control their wives and children. Some women even started to demand an equal voice in the household and in society at large. Can we even begin to understand how frightening and threatening all this was for the SCFs? And then - a final shattering blow - the end of communism and the Iron Curtain. Now there weren't even any godless commies around anymore to hate and to blame for all those disturbing changes happening all around the SCFs, that they couldn't stop and that made them feel so powerless, so insecure.
But there remained one refuge, one solace and consolation - it would surely always be acceptable to hate faggots and dykes! After all, God himself had declared them to be an abomination, hadn't He?

What we are witnessing today, this so-called "backlash", this wave of anti-Gay sentiment, is in fact the last desperate stand of those marginal personalities in our society who have a compelling and compulsive need to hate someone and blame others for their problems - real or imagined. It is a cry of -"Dammit! I have a RIGHT to hate someone, to hate THESE people, and you aren't going to take that away from me!!" Like a cornered bear, the SCFs can be expected to be irrationally vicious in attacking every manifestation of a liberalized view and acceptance of homosexuality in our society. It is not the Gay and Lesbian members of our society who are suffering from an emotional illness - it is in fact those persons who are passionately and irrationally opposed to equal civil rights for all members of our nations who need psychological help.