Homophobia is just a nice spin though. For the most part I couldn't care less about who people are dating or boning.
(Hydrophobia is another name for rabies. Rabies often induces a fear of water.)
It wasn't that long ago that they were claiming that gay marriage and acceptance would cause society to collapse, and believing that God would punish everyone for it. I had a neighbor who claimed that hurricane devastation is God's doing because gay marriage was legalized.
And that's not even getting into political and culture fears like male-to-female transgender people "trapping" men into having sex with them, or using the "wrong" bathrooms, or the extreme right-wing fears of a "gay agenda" to undermine traditional Christian-oriented culture, or "feminizing chemicals" being added to the water (the whole "gay frogs" thing) to increase the homosexual population and emasculate male aggression and military readiness. People even argue that homosexuality presents a threat to human evolution itself, despite being present in many known (and not extinct) animal species and likely humanity's own evolutionary ancestors as well as humanity itself.
Actually that part is kinda true. A fair bit of the effluent from paper mills, say, are estrogen analogs.
> Specific phobia is an anxiety disorder, characterized by an extreme, unreasonable, and irrational fear associated with a specific object or situation.[1][2] Specific phobia can lead to avoidance of the object or situation, persistence of the fear, and significant distress or problems functioning associated with the fear. A phobia can be the fear of anything.
Whatever the term originally meant to the greeks, it does seem to be knit with the concept of fear today.
It's used for things (like hydrophobic molecules) that avoid other things (in this case water) as if they fear them.
Unless we're doing one of those "literally literally means figuratively" things here in which case... meh?
Just to be crystal clear here, I'm not saying we don't have groups who are anti-X for whatever value of X. I'm saying that recasting (and often miscasting) that antipathy as (maybe masked) fear is counterproductive.