Interesting from the Washington Post...

Suggests something I've wondered about for years...

Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias Can Be an Illness

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 10, 2005; Page A01

The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement.

These fixations preoccupied him every day. Articles in magazines about gays made him agitated. He confessed that his fears had left him socially isolated and unemployed for years: A recovering alcoholic, the man even avoided 12-step meetings out of fear he might encounter a gay person.

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Mental health practitioners say they regularly confront extreme forms of racism, homophobia and other prejudice in the course of therapy, and that some patients are disabled by these beliefs. As doctors increasingly weigh the effects of race and culture on mental illness, some are asking whether pathological bias ought to be an official psychiatric diagnosis.

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It would be truly ironic if this amounts to something. Recently, the Holy Terrors have been falling back on the old claim that homosexuality is the mental disorder. Next thing you know, they'll be arguing that a woman's orgasm is a sign she's a witch.