I didn't think homophobia was really still a problem.
Welcome to the Internet.
I've been on the internet for 9 years now and I have only seen a few homophobes.
Especially in real life, I know thousands of people personally because that's just what its like in rural Ireland and not one of them is a homophobe. Maybe that's why I don't its a real problem anymore.
That's interesting.
From my experience (I live in Denmark and most of this was from a suburbish-semi-rural area) ever since around 5th or 6th grade in school, people (especially insecure guys) would yell "gay", "homo", "fag" etc. at each other as a slur. This is pretty universal and has happened a few times in my family as well.
Occasionally people in class put on music with the lyrics "gays bleed pink", "gays aren't real people" and so on.
High school was similar.
Some of those who use the words as slurs simply don't realize what they're saying, one in high school was for gay equality for example, but one day still called a football team he didn't like "gays". I asked him why he used that word for them and said I was gay and he said sorry.
Some others actually have pretty morbid ideas, I remember two random guys sitting talking at a table in front of me while I was soldering, one of them began to speak of how all gays were rich people involved in prostitution and other such delusional/misguided ideas.
On the political front we have two parties here dedicated to profiling themselves on anti-gay positions, the christian democrats who fortunately dropped out of the parlament last election, who like to judge and police other people according to some book they happen to really like, and Danish People's Party (DF), who also likes to share its lack of solidarity with immigrants and non-christians as well. When discussing a law in the parlament that set gay couples equal to hetero couples equal when they got children from artificial insemination, they somehow need make slippery slopes and compare it to being able to marry animals to make their points [
source]...
Then there's the mail someone working in their party accidentally sent to the whole media group at the parlament, instead of their party... Writing "extremist homosexual fraction groups should get some beatings" [
source]
I'm curious what kind of things they write internally
Kol
The Danish LGBT organization has
asked lots of politicians lots of questions on LGBT issues. One was:
"Do you think the religious communities should be able to decide by themselves whether they want to marry people of the same gender?" (The law forbade the marrying when the question was asked)
Here's a sample from the christian democrats party of the religion of love and all that...
- "No - I'm a Christian. And the Bible is the best guidance for life.
God is love. But marriage between two of the same gender is an abomination and rebellion against God. - Marriages in the church or blessings of homophiles etc. are frauds towards the homophiles etc."
- "If you force this on the established church, it will cease to exist, because people will be pouring out of it. So even if you forced the established church to do it, it would only be temporary, because the established church would cease to exist - but then there would be resemblance in the words, if you assume the free church doesn't simply take over....."
- "Yes - I ought to have written "NO", but I guess it will be misunderstood in the schedule. It is not up to the religious community to decide on God the Lord's ways who God should bless. The Bible contains many examples of humans who want to "bless", where God doesn't! Only a fool doesn't fear God's wrath!"
And then there's Enhedslisten, good we have them and Socialist Youth Front to fight for justice.
- "Yes - We should seperate state and church, and in my opinion, we thus can't make laws about who the religious communities must marry or not. As an atheist,
it's hard for me to understand why you would want to be a part of a religious community, which doesn't accept you as the one you are..."
- "Yes - But you could of course imagine the opposite situation, that the parliament says yes and the religious communities say no. Should the parliament not interefere with the religious communities' affairs in that case?"
- "
It is completely stupid to have a club, where the homosexuals are kept out. If they can't manage not discriminating, maybe they should just stop marrying people completely."
- "No - I'd actually rather abolish the religious communities' authority to marry people, but as long as they have that authority, they shouldn't be allowed to discriminate."
...After it was legalized they COULD say yes though, a gay couple who wished to get married in the church (for reasons beyond me),
got rejected by 17 priests.
So homophobia, anti-gay, anti-LGBT, whatever you want to call it, even the countries that get called the most tolerant are still infested with vermin who refuse to recognize, treat, speak of homos as equals. It will probably take a long time for the world to fight and overcome them, and the big problems obviously lie in the countries with death penalties and many years in prison as punishment above places like where I live...