This is a prejudice that runs very deep in British, and especially English, cultural history. I'm off to the Continent in a few days to lecture on Coleridge's Constitution of Church and State, and have been getting my thoughts in order about it. One rather trivial point: is there a -phobe term for it? A bigot who is prejudiced against gay people is a homophobe*; somehow prejudiced against muslims is a islamophobe and so on. What about someone who is prejudiced against Catholics? A Papophobe? It's a word that returns hits on a google search, but it sounds oddly to my ear -- in part because it sounds like a description of someone prejudiced against paper. I also wonder if it isn't marginally offensive (in the sense of being part of the historical rhetorical armoury of anti-Catholic discourse) to reduce an individual's Catholic faith to a mere allegiance to the Pope. Is there something else, vocabulary-wise?
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*The internet being what it is, use of this term is liable to draw out bigots who are indeed prejudiced against gay people but who repudiate the descriptor on the grounds that 'phobe' means fear, and (I paraphrase, based on more than one such online interaction) 'I am in no way scared of gay people; I simply do not think they should be permitted to get married' and so on. The way to tackle such people is not to insist that their prejudice, being patently irrational, probably is based on fear actually, perhaps on a subconscious level. This may indeed be true; but it misses the point. The etymology of the word notwithstanding, the word is now in common use to mean a person with any one of a wide range of prejudiced and oppressive beliefs and behaviours where gay people are concerned. Common usage is your best bet, I'd say.
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