Breakpoint Commentary by Chuck Colson

http://www.breakpoint.org

Extreme Bias Makeover
When Prejudice Becomes a Disease
December 15, 2005

Is hate a disease? Some psychiatrists think so. This
was the subject of a recent Washington Post article,
entitled "Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias
Can Be an Illness." The title suggests the ominous
implications.

The Post explains, "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."
In short, several psychiatrists are now pushing for racists
and people who suffer from "homophobia" to be labeled
mentally ill.

Could such a label possibly be justified? Well, the Post tries
to make the case by telling about a man who turned down a
job because he feared a co-worker might be gay, and who
would not go places where he thought he might run into a gay person.
Now that was an extreme case. The man did indeed have a phobia
that was interfering with his life, and probably needed help. The man’s
psychiatrist told the paper, "He felt under attack, he felt threatened."
Normally, that would be called paranoia. We wouldn’t be developing
some new mental illness.

Just think about where this could lead: In short order, we might
begin to put people who strongly oppose homosexual behavior
on the same level as people who suffer irrational fears of gays,
and declare both people mentally ill. After all, the American
Psychiatric Association says that homosexual behavior is normal.
So to strongly oppose it would be irrational. It’s a very short step
from there to saying that this person is suffering
from "pathological bias."

Already, the California Department of Corrections is experimenting
with drugs to eliminate prejudices. "We treat racism and homophobia
as delusional disorders," reported Shama Chaiken, the department’s
chief psychologist. A number of distinguished scientists agree that the
"clinical experience informs us that racism may be a manifestation
of the delusional process." Sometimes that’s true, as with a woman
mentioned in the Post who was deathly afraid of Jewish people.
But it’s not true that racism or homophobia always signal mental
disorder. And if we do not make that crucial distinction,
we are asking for big trouble.

It may sound extreme, but this is the beginning of a process that
has long been popular with tyrants. In the Soviet Union, Christians
were sent by the hundreds of thousands to mental institutions. The
state was officially atheist, so if you believe that there was a God,
you were insane. And it’s still a wonderful tool for oppressors
in places like China and North Korea.

There’s another side to this. As a psychiatrist told the
Washington Post, if we began to call bias a mental illness,
it would let criminals off the hook for any behavior. It will take
a few years, of course, to go all through the medical and
clinical analyses and deliberations of the American
Psychiatric Association.

But if the day should come that opposition to homosexual
conduct is labeled homophobia, and homophobia labeled
delusional, then it is a very short step to saying that belief in
the Bible, which labels that conduct sinful, is also
a mental disorder.

Frightening? Indeed. Impossible? I’m afraid not.