Atheist societies promoting homophobia or discrimination...

CoolJGS☺ made a good point in another thread by hinting that poorer countries from Asia and Africa draw greater attention about bad things as compared to relatively more prosperous Japan and China. There definitely is prevalence of homophobia in China (I have not done a research on Japan so can't say about them). China has the world's greatest number of irreligious population. So what drives homophobia and discriminations against homosexuals in China? Smith believes that religion may not be responsible for anti-homosexual stance in most parts of world. I differ with Smith. Religion definitely has played a key role in promoting anti-homosexual behaviour in most parts of world. It is not very hard to prove that. Just do a study of beliefs from various religious organisations or see the prevalence of harsh laws related to homosexuality in extremist religious countries and you would easily get the correlation between homophobia and religion.

So now the main question is that are there other major forces apart from religion which promote homophobia? Kerala province of India is a den of communists and homophobia runs deep even in the most hardcore anti-theist communists of Kerala. Similarly, the most homophobic relative that I have is a hardcore atheist. He is my cousin but hideously homophobic. So what drives homophobia in these people? It will be interesting if members of our board propose explanations for the question presented.

I believe that even for some of those people who have given up religion, the religious morality might not have left them. Also, we do not live in a closed society any more. This is not 11th century. People derive inspirations from other societies and do not want to be perceived as indulging in things which are not considered moral by the majority of world. That said, I personally do not dismiss non-religious reasons for homophobia. A feeling that a man should have physical relations with a woman only may be prevalent in certain people just because they believe it is abnormal or against nature to have sex with people of same sex. Of course, they are wrong in believing so but nonetheless they may believe that way. So to some extent homophobia can be explained as emerging from non-religious reasons. But religion has been the primary reason for discrimination against homosexuals in most parts of world.