Something that seems to surprise many who I've encountered, especially via the Internet, is that I am a heterosexual. In part, this might be because Gay Rights is one of the few political causes I've actively taken to heart, and many assume that only homosexuals have cause to care about homophobia.

This is not the case. Philosophically, homophobia - bigotry against others on the basis of their homosexuality - is offensive for a number of reasons. It is intrusive, because it pressures others to suppress that in themselves that, but for society's intolerance, would harm none. It is hateful, because by encouraging a punitive response to expressions of the condemned sexuality, it responds sadistically to that over which the unaggressing condemned has no control. One's sexual orientation is as innate as one's race, as one can easily see when one notices that homosexuality continues to exist even where it is most savagely persecuted and has been for centuries, leaving homophobia on the same moral plane as racism, intolerable on precisely the same grounds.

I would add, on a more personal level, that when my friends are attacked, I take that personally. That, and that there was an inevitability to this becoming a personal issue for me, because there's an innate totalitarianism in homophobia against which some of us can't help but rebel ... continue