'Homophobia is a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards homosexuality and people who are identified as or perceived as being homosexual. Definitions[1][2][3] refer variably to antipathy, contempt, prejudice, aversion, and irrational fear. Homophobia is observable in critical and hostile behavior such as discrimination[1][2] and violence on the basis of a perceived non-heterosexual orientation. In a 1998 address, author, activist, and civil rights leader Coretta Scott King stated that "Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood."[4]'
When a term becomes recognizable within a whole society, then the symbolism is as important as the clinical definition. IMO.
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