New survey suggests decline has strong correlation between Christian nationalism and opposition to inclusive policies
Public support for same-sex marriage and nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Americans has fallen, even as the overall share remains high, according to new findings by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute.
Broad majorities of Americans, regardless of political party or faith, continue to support LGBTQ+ rights and protections, the analysis found. But after years of rising public support, the decline is notable, said Melissa Deckman, CEO of the PRRI.
The survey analyzed Americans’ attitudes toward LGBTQ+ rights across three policies: same-sex marriage, nondiscrimination protections and religion-based service refusals. It found support for all three measures had softened for the first time since the PRRI began tracking views of the issues nearly a decade ago.
While the “vast majority of Americans continue to endorse protections for LGBTQ Americans”, Deckman said the results may serve as a “warning sign” for those working to safeguard the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans amid a conservative legislative and legal effort to erode them.
It’s the constant, incessant, and deranged attacks on trans people and drag queens. The sociopaths in charge of the Republican party have figured out that attacking them is a good way to keep their supporters frothing - and keep the money coming in.
Yeah, but how do you go from “queer people deserve the same rights as I do” to “no they don’t?”
People are impressionable to the rhetoric around them and these are people in communities that have had a concerted anti LGBTQ+ propaganda push.
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Please name a prominent person who craves this protected class status. Or is this just random people on the internet?
Because your random person who hates Pride is meaningless.
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Note: I’m a staunch proponent of equality before the law and unhindered access to opportunity for everyone
Those sound like weasel words. All people, rich or poor, are banned from sleeping under bridges and stealing food is “equality before the law.” Removal of programs that give minorities a step up is “unhindered access to opportunity.”
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I disagree, not sure why you wrote we when you don’t speak for me.
Those terms have pretty clear connotations. Your words, on the other hand, seem like dogwhistles, and your lack of clarification seems to cement that.
Can you actually present evidence of them saying what you claim? Because my Googling sure doesn’t show it. It does show a lot of right-wing hatred for this Lindy West person… and Wikipedia doesn’t even talk about them writing about queer issues, so I’m not sure where you’re even getting this from.
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So your evidence is a comedy show?
You do know what comedy means, right?
Remember, you’re never safe, you’re just further down the list.
Firstly, this is a poll. Remember, polls are bullshit.
Secondly, this is the Public Religion Research Institute. Made possible by a grant from the Unitarian church. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, just that that’s the case)
Thirdly, follow the link to the poll to see breakdowns like, “ Strong majorities of Americans — including most people of faith — support nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ individuals, but overall support has declined.” Do you use the term “people of faith”? No? Why or why not? That’s the third point against.
Fourthly, it’s a relatively large sample size, 22k, compared to the 800-2000 we usually see, using the Ipsos KnowledgePanel. Ostensibly a good thing. Link is at the bottom of the survey page. KP, for short, is an online poll. People get a random letter in the physical, postal mail. The letter says “Hi (your name here) we’re a super respectable polling agency who’d like to make money off your opinions” and includes a special seekrit password to “let” you sign up. So all the respondents did that. Would you do that?
Then, weeks or months (or years?) later you (as a KnowledgePanel Invitee extraordinaire) get a random email that says “go online and give us your opinion on ‘matters of faith’” (i’m just making that up, but they could have used that language)
Then, Fifthly, people went online to share their real honest and true thoughts about LGBTQIA+ protections and other matters “of faith”. Does being online skew people’s opinions? You’d always answer online as you would face-to-face wouldn’t you?
Okay, that’s all I got.
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I noticed since at least a couple of years a pervasive and ever more widespread campaign against representation and lgbtq rights, and the early phase passed through apparently meaningless but popular thing like pop culture and gaming, including the social media sphere at large.
But this time, they’re aiming for a much larger political action, and their tools aren’t the ones of entertainment media but those of traditional values. They appeal to things they know for being popular and still largely followed, like religions and whatever moves around it.
The trend is clearly there, before our very eyes, and yet we still don’t take action. I don’t know if I have such a strong identity, you know, and for this exact reason I don’t want to see this much people suffer. On top of a political crisis this is an empathy one too, IMHO.
On top of a political crisis this is an empathy one too, IMHO.
Very much so. And maybe the crisis of empathy is the deeper, more critical problem.
I have noticed that, right alongside the attacks against LGBTQIA+ folks, there has been an overt effort to normalize both apathy AND the “disorders of conscience” (sociopathy, narcissism, etc) to try to repaint those lacking conscience and guilt as just “different” instead of the amoral predators among prey, who believe conscience is for the weak, that they are.
There was an article in the NY Times just a couple weeks ago doing that, and it wasn’t the first. “Oh, sociopaths aren’t that terrible, just different,” that kind of shit, addressing the actual damage they do and the lives they leave wrecked in language more suited to a statistics report.
The first paragraph:
Sociopaths are modern-day boogeymen, and the word “sociopath” is casually tossed around to describe the worst, most amoral among us. But they are not boogeymen; they are real people and, according to Patric Gagne, widely misunderstood. Gagne wrote “Sociopath,” her buzzy forthcoming memoir, to try to correct some of those misunderstandings and provide a fuller picture of sociopathy, which is now more frequently referred to as antisocial personality disorder. As a child, Gagne found herself compelled toward violent outbursts in an effort to try to compensate for the emotional apathy that was her default. As she got older, those compulsive behaviors turned into criminal ones like trespassing and theft.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/25/magazine/patric-gagne-interview.html
Agreed. My support for gay rights has gone from “it’s just right that they should be able to marry and live how they please” to “if you touch them I swear to fucking god I will stop at nothing until you’re a destitute nobody”.
Centrists will really be the end of us.
“Moderate” conservatives don’t give a shit. If their neighbors are anti-LGBTQ, then they think it must not be that bad to be anti-LGBT. They would rather not support LGBTQ, especially when it doesn’t affect their lives directly, than be considered not Republican.
The changes were largely driven by a shift in conservative attitudes toward LGBTQ+ protections.
Slightly fewer Republicans said they favored laws protecting LGBTQ+ Americans from discrimination in 2023 than did in 2015, despite rising support in the intervening years. The decline was especially notable between 2022, when two in three Republicans backed such protections, and 2023, when the share dropped to roughly six in 10.
So despite the combined statistic, this is really just the right-wing doubling down on extremism. Those that had moderated social views seem to be following the toxic leaders who have made abusing LGTBQ+ people as their pet “two minutes of hate” project.
Centrist gonna centrist, even when it comes to blindly deciding how much to hate someone for no fucking good reason.
Centrist position is not hating on lgbt, that’s just misrepresentation
The centrist position might now currently have shifted to not hating LGBTQ people, but it is also a misrepresentation to say that positive change came from a realization, capacity for intellectual agency, or evolution within the ideology of centrism rather than just a shifting calculus for where the perceived middle is on a particular issue.
In other words, centrists don’t actually give af, they just realize it is probably not a good idea to be perceived as hating on the LGBTQ people so they just let go of their hate and adjust their position no problem. Yes, most of them no longer hate LGTBQ people in their hearts, but do I really give a fuck if they would as soon hate LGTBQ too if that better fit the calculus of the center?
If you want proof of this, just look to the colossal sea of centrist celebrities and media figures who appear to be utterly mystified by the seemingly arbitrary new rules that are always being made about what is offensive and what they can’t say… and the even more colossal sea of normal people who triangulate their own opinions and views off of those figures. The popularization of the concept of “identity politics” is in a large way a forging of this nebulous, diffuse confusion over the reasons behind why culture is changing into a singular named entity that can be pointed at, blamed and thus minimized to comfort and give space to centrists struggling to keep up with memorizing the new scripts of respectability culture without any understanding of their meaning (that would render a memorization of the details unnecessary).
That’s not the case for a lot of people. When I was in middle school, I had the centrist position that a marriage should be between a man and a woman, as was the law at the time, but gays should have the right to form civil unions.
But because I’m not a literal child anymore, I realized it’s not going to work because conservatives will fight every right at every step so civil unions can’t be equal.
The non-voting public and celebrities are not centrist because they don’t even know what that means. They might randomly have opinions that are an average of what their friends think, but that’s not the same as forming your own opinion with nuance after thinking about the issue
That’s not the case for a lot of people. When I was in middle school, I had the centrist position that a marriage should be between a man and a woman, as was the law at the time, but gays should have the right to form civil unions.
But because I’m not a literal child anymore, I realized it’s not going to work because conservatives will fight every right at every step so civil unions can’t be equal.
Honestly, high five, you just proved my point better than I could, I am just going to stop talking and let you keep talking!
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
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