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[Tack]

Vector, you really need to just sig whatever delicious looking food is your avatar whenever you change it, so I can stop asking.

Because they're all awesome, and usually exotic.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

The questions may lead to a predilection for certain answers. When you ask about "should this person who admits this thing be allowed to do that thing" it places the answerer in a position of hypothetical authority and the subject of the question as a lurker who has had a veil reluctantly stripped away. "Just how wrong is this" is definitely a leading question, especially when there is no answer for "I have no business telling people how to live their lives" and "homosexuality is great!" Need better question-writers.

Their conclusion skips a logical step. They assume that being homophobic is stressful; perhaps actively excluding people from your tribe is a soothing behavior, building community bonds with the people you aren't excluding. They simply cannot claim that their study has anything to do with stress. All they can claim is what their data shows. They refer to "existing studies" but I'm not seeing those quoted. Their study group may have had unusually lower levels of stress (or higher) than the norm for some other reason, so that any increased stress from homophobia is obscured.

Who administered the test? I assume there would be a difference in answers if an extremely effeminate male administered the questionnaire vs. a (stereotypically-assumed-to-be-straight) masculine one.

Also what was their population? People in a mall? College students? High school students? Perhaps their study group is physically biased in some way. How many of these people claimed to be heterosexual but were somewhere other than the vanishingly small percentage of "completely hetero" on the Kinsey scale? How many outright gay guys answered after claiming to be hetero? Did their testing occur in an anonymous, safe environment where people felt willing to tell the truth?

And I don't see cause of death. I see a jump from "homophobes die faster" hand-in-hand with "homophobes have more stress" to "people with more stress have more cardiovascular problems". How many of those people died in accidents? Perhaps homophobia is correlated with risk-seeking behavior? How many of those deaths were stress-related and thus relate at all to the stress-prejudice link they're trying to assert?

Just how did they "adjust for mortality differences based on health" etc. without quoting and pulling actuarial data from the many studies that have reasonably proven those numbers? I feel like there's a huge data transformation happening that can be fiddled with one way or the other. How did they handle outliers? Even if they didn't set out to prove a preconception, which is to say, a prejudice - people can get it wrong just by making mistakes.

[SalmonGod]

I would venture that stress is also a factor.  Getting all worked up and angry over other people being different from you isn't really a healthy habit.  Maybe you guys have never noticed how a bigot's body language and facial expression seizes up with tension when someone dares tarnish their perfect homogeneous vision of the world...

Ninja'd... I hadn't actually read the study.  Just saw the discussion about it.  Didn't know it actually concluded stress as a factor.  I realize that anecdote and science don't mix, but I don't think I've ever seen a prejudice challenged, without the one who holds it getting very obviously tense.

[Tack]

Hah. I got 'full hetero' on the Kinsey scale, despite answering in the affirmative to being open to intimate activities with my gender.

[Kadzar]

I say never try to come to any meaningful conclusion from a single study. Especially if that study confirms your preconceived notions.

[Descan]

Assuming everything else is equal, it's probably a symptom rather than a cause. I'd wager that it's more along the lines of people who are homophobic are more likely to hold other hate-filled views, and they get a lot of stress from those. Especially if the cause of early death is cardiovascular.

Edit: Assuming there even is a correlation, could be a bad study yeah.

Editedit: I too did not care to read it. :3 Just going off the other peeps in da hizzle yo.

[EnigmaticHat]

My guess is that people who are homophobic tend to come from certain areas, and people in those areas tend to be slightly shorter lived.

[Descan]

I doubt they took homophobic people from one area and non-homophobic people from another area and compared them.

Not only would that be stupid to introduce bias like that, but it'd be even harder than to just ask people in a single area (to keep geographical bias to a minimum) about their views, and then watch their average death ages.

[Max White]

Or... Now hear me out here, there is a ancient order of homo-shinobi who are secretly killing rednecks and making it look like natural deaths. So be nice, gay ninjas might be watching.

[Descan]

NINJAS?!

* Descan goes pillaging on the Japanese coast.

fucking ninjers husslin' in my turf

[Mr. Strange]

Or... Now hear me out here, there is a ancient order of homo-shinobi who are secretly killing rednecks and making it look like natural deaths. So be nice, gay ninjas might be watching.

Is this from that series where they dressed as bunny men to infiltrate night club? I think I saw it while back.

Edit: club, not glub. Ok, sleepy time now...

[Frumple]

... night glub? Atlantis is involved, now?

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Or... Now hear me out here, there is a ancient order of homo-shinobi who are secretly killing rednecks and making it look like natural deaths. So be nice, gay ninjas might be watching.

Is this from that series where they dressed as bunny men to infiltrate night glub? I think I saw it while back.

Did they kill rednecks?

[tahujdt]

Really, my major issue with the term 'homophobia' is that it is a misnomer in countless ways. Ignoring the total disregard for etymology and taking it as it is meant to be taken, it still accuses anti-gay people of fearing homosexuals. While this may be true in some cases, by and large it is the equivalent of calling abortionists 'babyphobics'. If it is meant to indicate hate, that still is largely incorrect. I, personally, think of homosexuality as 'wrong' for a number of reasons which I shall not detail in the interest of keeping this thread as non-political as possible, but I neither hate homosexuals, shun them, or presume to tell other people how to live their life. Now, 'gay marriage', an oxymoron in and of itself, is a different issue altogether, but again, not going into it right now.

The questions in the study seemed to have an overly-broad definition of 'homophobic', which is my major issue with it.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I dunno about you but I'm hella afraid of babies.