{"id":4,"date":"2006-09-14T17:17:41","date_gmt":"2006-09-15T00:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.herek.net\/blog\/2006\/09\/14\/beyond-homophobia\/"},"modified":"2007-06-25T09:00:36","modified_gmt":"2007-06-25T17:00:36","slug":"beyond-homophobia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/herek.net\/blog\/beyond-homophobia\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Homophobia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to <em>Beyond Homophobia<\/em>, a blog by Gregory Herek. I&#8217;ll be commenting here on recent news events and public policy related to sexual orientation, with a focus on how research from the social and behavioral sciences can inform current debates and discussions in this arena.<\/p>\n<p>Why &#8220;Beyond Homophobia&#8221;?  <em>Homophobia <\/em>was coined in the 1960s by psychologist George Weinberg. The term proved to be tremendously influential in reframing society&#8217;s thinking about sexual orientation. It helped many people to articulate their newfound understanding that  homosexuality wasn&#8217;t the problem; rather, the real problem was prejudice against those who aren&#8217;t heterosexual.<\/p>\n<p>Despite its importance, homophobia has serious limitations as a term and a concept. Primary among these are the assumptions it conveys. <em>Homophobia<\/em> implies that hostility toward sexual minorities is a disease rather than a form of prejudice, and that its ultimate source is irrational fear (a &#8220;phobia&#8221;). Although fear can play a role in prejudice, many other emotions are involved as well. And prejudice is not purely a matter of emotion.  It can reflect deeply felt values and belief systems, as well as power struggles and conflicts among groups in the larger culture.<\/p>\n<p>Today, four decades after the creation of homophobia, we need a new way of thinking about the prejudice and stigma that are still directed at sexual minorities. In <a href=\"http:\/\/psychology.ucdavis.edu\/rainbow\/html\/bibabs.html#abs2004a\" target=\"blog\">my own writings<\/a>, I have begun to utilize the terms <em>sexual prejudice<\/em> and <em>sexual stigma<\/em> to describe these phenomena. I&#8217;m not crusading to have these terms replace homophobia in popular discourse, but I believe they can be useful in pushing us to think about the problem of hostility against sexual minorities in new ways.<\/p>\n<p>I plan to use this weblog to share my thoughts about sexual prejudice and its relationship to cultural events and public policy. I will also report interesting findings from behavioral and social science research &#8212; my own and that of others &#8212; in a way that I hope nonresearchers will find informative and useful.  I hope my comments here can contribute to the work of advocates and activists who are trying to eradicate sexual prejudice.<\/p>\n<p>Please stay tuned!<\/p>\n<p><!-- ckey=\"450CA3DB\" --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to Beyond Homophobia, a blog by Gregory Herek. I&#8217;ll be commenting here on recent news events and public policy related to sexual orientation, with a focus on how research from the social and behavioral sciences can inform current debates and discussions in this arena. Why &#8220;Beyond Homophobia&#8221;? Homophobia was coined in the 1960s by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/herek.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/herek.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/herek.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/herek.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/herek.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/herek.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/herek.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/herek.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/herek.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}