Aging & Wisdom Quote by George Weinberg

Weinberg flips the moral script with a deceptively casual line that lands like a rebuke: “deviant” isn’t a type of person, it’s a type of harm. Coming from the psychologist who helped popularize the term “homophobia,” the intent is pointed. He’s not pleading for tolerance as a favor to marginalized people; he’s questioning the legitimacy of the category that made them marginal in the first place.

The subtext is that “deviance” has always been less a clinical finding than a social weapon. Mid-20th-century American psychology and psychiatry routinely treated homosexuality as pathology, giving medical polish to cultural disgust. Weinberg’s phrasing sidesteps the trap of arguing about which desires are “normal” (a fight that concedes too much to the arbiters of normality). Instead, he anchors ethics in behavior: mistreatment is the only deviation that matters. It’s a clean, strategic reframing that turns the spotlight away from identity and onto conduct.

There’s also a personal provocation tucked inside “I didn’t grow up…” It implies that moral common sense can exist prior to institutional labeling. If a child can navigate right and wrong without policing people’s private lives, the adult obsession with categorizing “deviants” starts to look learned, not natural - a prejudice taught, maintained, and professionalized.

In an era when diagnostic manuals functioned as cultural law, Weinberg’s line reads like civil disobedience in plain language: stop mistaking difference for danger; start measuring harm where it actually happens.