SRS, right you are - I for one am not going to repeat the former debate, no matter what tricks they try. But semantics is a different thing.

Lighter, my point is not only based on etymology, but on usage in the last decades of the 20th century, in English and French. I can speak from my own experience: self-declared taboo busters (in England) accused me of homophobia because I avoided touching other (heterosexual) men in the men's shower room.

Aversion against homosexuals was so commonplace then that no special word for it was needed.

A widespread idea (among those taboo busters) was that homophobic men are afraid of being accused of being homosexual themselves - rightly or not. Those who indeed had that motive (- not I -) may well have shouted against homosexuals more loudly than others. Note that the "hippies" and feminists preached softiehood, not homosexuality.

In Turkey, for example, men will often touch each other in ways that western societies reserve for women; this does not affect their attitude towards homosexuality.

In other words, many authors since ca. 2000 (1998?) use the word to mean something else than before. The only reason I can imagine for this is that they were looking for a word that had already acquired a pejorative value in "progressive" circles. This is not good semantics, and the OP's idea of "newspeak" is not without cause (- however often he is guilty of it himself).

Well, since many of us seem to have forgotten the old meaning and its context already, the risk of confusion and manipulation is not as high as in other similar cases.