One of the things I'm finding is that low IQ's, racism, and homophobia are all related, predicated mostly in Christian upbringing in the United States. And considering at least one of the emails that The Dark Wind has received, it appears to me that the evidence continues to be borne out accurately.

Hatred and bigotry are most often associated with fear, and quite often among homophobic bigots, the fear is part of the hate monger's denial of his or her own sexual feelings towards others of the same gender which the individual thinks makes him or her "a little gay."

A number of clinical studies have been conducted that looks into racial and homophobic hatred, and The Skeptic Tank once took a brief look at homophobia and came across a study:

http://www.raids.org/homosex.htm

A fairly recent article covering homophobic hatred was posted to a number of Usenet groups so I decided I'd add a copy of it here at The Dark Wind since I'm finding the racists exhibit all the traditional characteristics of homophobic bigots.

New Study Links Homophobia with Homosexual Arousal

http://www.apa.org/releases/homophob.html

Psychoanalytic theory holds that homophobia -- the fear, anxiety, anger, discomfort and aversion that some ostensibly heterosexual people hold for gay individuals -- is the result of repressed homosexual urges that the person is either unaware of or denies. A study appearing in the August 1996 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA), provides new empirical evidence that is consistent with that theory.

Researchers at the University of Georgia conducted an experiment involving 35 homophobic men and 29 nonhomophobic men as measured by the Index of Homophobia scale. All the participants selected for the study described themselves as exclusively heterosexual both in terms of sexual arousal and experience.

Each participant was exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual and lesbian videotapes (but not necessarily in that order). Their degree of sexual arousal was measured by penile plethysmography, which precisely measures and records male tumescence.

Men in both groups were aroused by about the same degree by the video depicting heterosexual sexual behavior and by the video showing two women engaged in sexual behavior. The only significant difference in degree of arousal between the two groups occurred when they viewed the video depicting male homosexual sex: 'The homophobic men showed a significant increase in penile circumference to the male homosexual video, but the control [nonhomophobic] men did not.'