Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Normaphobia - The Fear of All Things Normal

Normaphobia clearly needs to be added to Webster's. It's time.

I was looking for a word to describe that feeling that afflicts so many San Franciscans, and "normaphobia" seemed to fit the bill. Literally speaking, it means (or would mean if it was a real word) "the fear or hatred of the normal."

Closely related is "xenomania" - or "an inordinate love of the foreign and strange."

Doing a search of this new word, I came across a hilarious and very right-on piece from the FreeRepublic written in 2004 by John Derbyshire called
"Here to Stay: We're here, we're mildly and tolerantly homophobic, get used to it!"

Here's a bit of it, click the link for the whole thing...

Having previously described myself in these pages, and elsewhere, as "a mild, tolerant homophobe," I feel it is incumbent upon me to speak out now and then about homogamy (that is, "gay marriage") and kindred topics on behalf of the homophobe community — part of the larger Homophobic, Anti-Lesbian, Transsexuality-Hostile Or Moralistically-Oriented (HALTHOMO) community. The following are just random fugitive thoughts, with no particular coherence from one section to another and in no particular order.

Their worst nightmare. A "mild, tolerant homophobe" is the homo-activist's worst nightmare. Even to admit the possible existence of such a creature would explode his entire ideology. Anyone who does not give whole-hearted, roaring approval to the entire homo-agenda must, must, be tarred as a stump-toothed knuckle-dragging primitive, probably afflicted with grave psychiatric problems and hopelessly out of touch with the zeitgeist. If you are not totally on board with absolutely every tiny point of homo-dogma, then you are a sick, poisonous bag of cruelty and evil, who must be destroyed. That's what ideologues are like; that's the totalitarian mindset.


Just as Lenin hated the mild, constitutional Mensheviks with far more passion than he could ever bring to bear against the Tsar and his Cossacks, the homo-agitators hate folk like me much more intensely than they hate the killers of Matthew Shepard. Those felons, after all, serve a very useful purpose for homo-propagandists: By their awful crimes, they validate the victim status of homosexuals, and thereby the homo-activist project of upturning our society and rewriting all its laws to eliminate the "root causes" of such outrages. (Which are: the slightest, merest, faintest hints or traces of disapproval of homosexual acts.)


I, on the other hand, am of no use to them, and say things they don't want people to hear.


Well, all of that is their problem, not mine. I've been in this world long enough to know who I am, and I'm not in the habit of apologizing for any of it. I also know that there are vast numbers of Americans — many tens of millions — who think pretty much the way I do about this topic, and they are probably not in much of a mood to apologize about their views, either. We're here, we're mildly and tolerantly homophobic, get used to it!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The trouble with the normaphobes is that they always have ridiculous demands. If their demands are met today, they'll have new ones and more ridiculous ones tomorrow. I take pleasure in seeing them frustrated because they are so offensive. I hope normal people will realize there is only one practical policy for them; that is to frustrate them always.

Anonymous said...

I was very tired when the hospital released my wife. I was thanking the male nurse and he (the nurse) whom I really appreciated his caring for my wife, out of the blue said to me "I'm gay".

Now, I could care less if he was an alien, I was tired and just didn't respond to him in a catering way and I guess he was offended.

After reading your article I don't feel alone anymore.

Anonymous said...

I kind of think this evolved out of the meme that created that blog Stuff White People Like- the idea that Whites aren't really anything, we can't jump, we're nerds (AKA boring), Homer Simpson (normal Joe Average Dork meme) and other TV-consciousness ideas.
Like piercings, and all these people claiming they are bi-polar or EMO,wanting to cling to word-tags to define them, thinking this somehow gives them a meaning-something community in which they can belong and co-suffer or rejoice or be 'proud' about.

Funny, when I was growing up, I always thought tolerance meant leave people alone, period.They do their thing, you do yours and the world goes on, nobody gets hurt.

None of this clap and cheer and wear pins every day and life as an encounter group, like the one poster with the story about the male nurse. What's this nurse want, a medal?

Anonymous said...

Why must you continue to tease and torture us by withholding that juicy color close-up of your splendid member?