I was raised in a conservative Christian family that belonged to a church denomination branching off of Mormonism - It took (is taking?) years to deconstruct and understand the hate that I participated in and supported.

I strongly recommend watching the movie Jesus Camp to get a better understanding how Christian youth groups/camps can brainwash kids so they grow up to become adults who are so ignorant of the world outside their small Christian community that they know little more than what church authorities tell them. In my case I hated the LGBTQ+ community because hating you was my identity. I was taught to be one of “god’s chosen people” preserving the correct way to live. It was often preached that natural disasters were god’s way of punishing non-believers and those whose faith was not strong enough. The congregation I attended literally believed that all the natural disasters, pollution, and systemic failings around the world were god’s vengeance against gays, liberals, and socialists. - e.g. I attended a sermon where the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill was literally and explicitly blamed on Obama’s support for gay marriage.

If you were raised in such an insular, dependent, and ignorant community it is most likely you would learn the hate too. When you believe you and your religion are literally the center of the universe (you are the “chosen people” in a supernatural power struggle between good and evil) you too would feel anxious, threatened, pressured and quick to resort to violence.

The conservative Christians I grew up around who hated the LGTBQ+ community were generally emotionally immature. Their personal development, like mine, stunted by the church from an early age. It takes years to unlearn the judgemental conformity, moral superiority, and cognitive dissonance that is so integral to many congregations and denominations today. Faced with the prospect of questioning your core-beliefs, leaving your friends and family behind, and abandoning so much of your identity it’s totally understandable, yet horrible, that people will choose to double down on the only beliefs they really understand.

That’s why I hated the LGBTQ+ community - Because I was taught that you were the root of so much supernatural evil in the world, but if I were asked “why do you hate gay people” I would have told you “I don’t hate gay people, I hate their actions. I just don’t like them, it’s unnatural”. Eventually I realized that people are their actions and you can’t hate one without hating the other.

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They’re brought up with constructed ideas of what masculinity and femininity are. Those ideas become ingrained in their identity. If something challenges that on any level they react negatively. Nearly all people are not 100% heterosexual or homosexual but instead exist on a spectrum. However if you don’t want your constructed identity challenged by feelings you might be having that aren’t heteronormative you’re going to push those feelings away and anybody associated with them. Most of these homophobes probably have at least some non-heteronormative desires or fantasies and so work extra hard to fight against them so society doesn’t perceive them as less masculine or less feminine. They would probably be so much happier if they just gave in and explored a bit.

Only one of many reasons of course, but when I was living in a conservative part of the US, I ran into a lot of people whose perception of equality/inequality was very sensitive to “the rules are changing” as opposed to how people are affected by those rules. Since they or people they know have made a lot of sacrifices to conform to societal expectations, it strikes them as deeply unfair when such expectations are not enforced on others. It’s the sort kind of reaction you might have when playing a game, and midway through your opponent suddenly invokes a house rule they never told you about. Not only would you be upset about the surprise, but you might worry about getting caught off-guard again in the future or be suspicious that the house rule was made up on the spot to disadvantage you. But life isn’t just a game, and we don’t get any chances to play again, so, understandably, these people take actual societal changes much more seriously. What they don’t seem to focus on as much is whether the original societal expectations are beneficial or not—they may well be aware that society treats some groups badly, but see that as either an ineradicable problem or a necessary evil to avoid pulling the rug out mid-game. As someone with a pretty consequentialist outlook, that meant that these people and I were talking past each other a lot, not only on LGBTQA+ acceptance and rights, but on any issue where society is changing.

Interestingly, for those who have being Christian as an important part of their identity, Jesus actually preaches against this kind of thinking in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard at the start of Matthew 20. I also happen to be Christian (though the kind that wonders how anyone could see the gospels as anything but pro-LGBTQA+), and I have had mild success bringing up this story and just finding some common ground on what “fair” means before getting into more specific topics.

I think that the people who are most vocal in their hate are opening a window into their own internal judgement. They are filled with toxicity that is designed to keep people in line, to serve specific roles (man, especially). It spills outward, but it works inward too.

If you believe in the importance of your Masculine Role™️, in the rigidity of it - and it’s the most important part of these people’s identity, everything revolves around it; trucks, guns, gettin’ er done, etc. - when you see people who reject your entire concept, its a personal attack. It calls into question the validity of their own identity, which they didn’t get to choose anyway - that was the point. Their minds are forced to contend with the reality of a diversity of gender/sexual expression - it either softens or hardens their hearts.

Imagine being a manly man in manly ville who has defined their entire life around manliness. But hating it the entire time. The burden of a role you didn’t make for yourself. Accepting that you could have done different, been different, is hard, and their community makes it impossible.

Obviously the right thing to do is to soften on traditional roles, for their own sake and others, and to reject pressure from everyone they know even if it means being alone. It’s hard to do.

In addition to what everyone else said, conservatives have been using queer people as a wedge issue since the lavender scare. This didn’t create the initial hatred, but it definitely amplified it.

i think a lot of it is projecting jealousy, fear, and most of the time just spouting ignorance passed down from generation to generation :/

I think it’s probably several different reasons but I think a big one is the fear of the unknown. Basically they hate us because we’re different, I think it’ll be important to continue normalizing LGBTQIA+ things. I think the major backlash happening now is because it’s being more normalized, these people are so set in their ways and are so terrified of change that they’re letting their hatred control them. It’s the whole boomer mentality of “this thing is different from when I grew up, therefore I hate it.”/“I’m too old and therefore refuse to learn/change” (and yes I realize not all bigots are boomers, but you don’t have to be a boomer to act like one)

Mostly fear born from ignorance. It is getting better tough, and it will get even better

I’m inclined to think that the primary reason is how sexually repressed the average person is.

I’m thinking of it this way:

The average person hides their kinks, and normalizes the utter segregation of sexuality from life in general in rhetoric. Obviously life isn’t separate from sexuality, therefore any display of mainstream sexuality from which there’s no hiding, is deemed non-sexual. Hyper-sexualized tv shows, sexualization of young people, cishet couples walking hand in hand or even kissing publicly are ignored to a large degree. Of course there are puritans out there but we’re talking about the average person here.

When all this contradicting behavior pushes the cognitive dissonance to unbearable degrees, the average person looks for a target to lash out, to blame for the stress their own sexual repression creates within them.

As a result, the sexually repressed average person can’t see, hear or think about any aspect of the lgbtq+ community without their own sexual urges boiling over like an overfilled pot of soup. They think the difference between themselves and the openly out members of the lgbtq+ community is that the average person knows how to keep their kinks, fetishes and sexuality to themselves, while the lgbtq+ community makes a culture out of showing off theirs.

They literally can’t understand being lgbtq+ isn’t a kink or a fetish, nor is it solely based on sexual expression, because their own sexual expression is normalized into everyday culture for everyone to see 24/7, thus a gay couple walking their kid to school in the morning is no different to them than themselves getting a footjob on the sidewalk next to the school.

At least this is my two cents.

Considering, no one cared about gay men or women in history until Christian based religion dominated (see Greece, Rome, etc.) I blame religion. A lot of people aren’t going to read the bible, but cherry-pick it to suit their needs. Removing pedos (the cherry-picked same sex attracted ones) from the equation (as there were a lot, especially with Spartans and Romans), and there are still LGBT people, of age.

The same bible that says gay people should be killed also says to love thy neighbor (ironic, as I am cherry-picking right now). I feel as if the only reason LGBT people are in the bible is someone had an agenda against someone they opposed, and decided to slander based on something like who they chose to slept with.

In my case, it was simply a mixture of blind ignorance and the desire to fit in. As I grew up in a very conservative area of the U.S. Midwest, my entire adult family and most of my peers held bigoted views, and thus so did I. The environment of my upbringing was one of hate and ignorance, so it’s no surprise I would find myself hateful and ignorant as well. Of course, I’ve since left these views behind and realized I’m actually bisexual, but I could’ve easily fallen further down the alt-right pipeline.

I thin that, besides all of the other comments here, there’s also a misconception regarding LGBTQ along phobes. Phobes have negative ideas in their head when they hear LGBTQ, and these ideas were born from misunderstanding. When you actually start explaining concepts as gender dysphoria for example to phobes, there is a pretty big chance they will become allies

I’m not in the community and I don’t get it either. Why can’t people just let other people be themselves (if they don’t hurt anyone of course and aren’t mean and such)? I’m so sorry that you feel this way because you shouldn’t have to for just being you. I do my best and point people out if they use hateful language and why that’s hurtful to someone.

Human psychology looks for out groups to demonize. We humans get psychological benefits from doing this. It helps us cope, it helps us bond with our in groups. As pathetic as that may be.

Right now, people are more scared for the future than they have been in generations. We are dealing with utterly unprecedented threats that have the capacity to actually end our current society. Fascism promises we can go back to a Better Time. It encourages people to blame all the fear and anger they feel on scapegoats. Charismatic personalities abuse and amplify these human tendencies for power. The seeds are there in all of us, waiting for the right conditions for hate to grow. It’s like the man says, you’re a whole different person when you’re scared.

I think that the progress of the last 40 years has been made by showing people that homosexuals are not a separate group that can meaningfully be targeted but rather represents a cross section of every single community on Earth. It’s harder and harder to think of them as other. But unfortunately, that fight has to be fought over and over for every other marginalized group under our umbrella.