Bigotry as an Illness

The Washington Post has an article today about some psych professionals arguing that extreme bias should be categorized as a mental illness, citing several examples which include a homophobic man who has turned down a job because he thought a co-worker might be gay, avoids 12-step programs to deal with his alcoholism because he someone there might be gay, and blames most of his sundry personal problems on the gay rights movement, and an anti-Semitic woman who believes Jews are diseased and will “infect” her, leading to compulsive cleaning and an avoidance of treatment because she fears her therapist would be Jewish.

AMERICAblog’s John Aravosis endorses the idea, suggesting “this would set the tone for an entire change in the culture, where prejudice of any kind of is considered the work of sick people. That would influence every debate the religious right tries to weigh in to.” I’m not so sure. Most people would consider the extreme case studies noted above “sick people” as it is. Those who suffer from less pathological prejudices are generally thought of, by reasonable people, to be wrong, the impetus for their wrongness correctly identified as ignorance and/or fear—something over which they have control. Identifying such behaviors as a mental illness seems, more than anything, to suggest a future in which defendants on trial for murdering someone they don’t like can claim their innocence by reason of mental defect. Bigotry isn’t a mental defect; it’s a learned behavior, and it doesn’t warrant a get-out-of-jail free card.