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?”
There’s a psychological phenomenon, a cascade effect, that causes people’s perceptions to flip if enough people around them also change their minds.
It’s not nefarious, or a sign of stupidity or ignorance, it’s part of how social primates like humans work. And it’s something that the Right knows to work, and is exploiting.
It’s how we got LGBTQ rights, and it’s how we’ll lose them if we, and especially the media, don’t stop giving these troglodytes and their ideas oxygen.
Anyone who tells you that if we just educate people it’ll make a difference ( it won’t, cf the Backfire Effect) and that “sunshine is the best disinfectant” is either woefully ignorant of how humans work, or is actively disingenuous.
Tl;dr radical centrists are paving stones on the path to He’ll.
I agree it works in the opposite direction too. My boys both LGBTQ ask me about gays when I was teenager and I had to admit I never met any and if I ever thought about gay people it was not in a positive light.
Keep in mind I grew up in Southern Baptist environment were my dad was a racist. But when I grew up got away my prospective change when I got around more left wing individuals and exposed to gay people.
My daughter is queer and it is to my shame that when I was around her age (13), I used “gay” and “fag” as insults. This was Indiana in the late 1980s. That’s not an excuse for my behavior, just an explanation for why I thought it was okay.
And the really bad thing is my much older brother’s best friend is gay and I had known him since I was 5 or 6 but I did that anyway.
I was guilty of that kind of behavior too. We’re social creatures and will repeat what those around us say, sometimes without considering how that might be received - especially when we were young and dumb.
Things have changed culturally since then. It took brave people in marginalized groups to stand up and bring awareness that they did not appreciate having their identities used as pejoratives before a lot of us realized that we were being jerks unintentionally.
We can’t change the past, but we can do better for the future. The fact that you realized that you needed to do better and did is about all one can reasonably expect from a human being.
Thanks, I agree. And it didn’t take me more than a year or two after that to realize it thankfully.
Phil Ochs knew that all the way back in 1966. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azdlpIy7oaQ
Edit: Unfortunately, that song slurs lesbians. Oh well.
Reminds me of Edward Berneys, nephew of Sigmund Freud and “father of public relations”.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
– Propaganda (1928) pp. 9–10 Source
Cool documentary The Century of the Self for anyone who wants to learn more about this goon
We need to educate the people who have not made up their minds. The internet is an excellent place to engage people who are sitting on the fence on a whole host of issues. We are in an information race, to reach as many people as possible. Not participating is how the fascists win. edit: typo
That’s actually my point: educating them doesn’t really work, and the failure of the information deficit hypothesis (and the ensuing understanding of the Backfire Effect) has pretty much proven it.
We need to pivot from trying to inform people and focus on changing their minds.
Fascists don’t bother with facts, because they don’t really work. They’ve realized that people’s brains aren’t computers, they’re rationalization engines that are just trying to make sense of the world and align it with ones precepts and social groups.
What would go a long was is coming down on the media and how it frames issues as having two sides, with equal validity. That’ll at least prevent the more toxic ideas from getting an audience, and thusly credibility.
We need to pivot from trying to inform people and focus on changing their minds.
This is a contradiction. People’s minds will only change with new information. In the long term, some minds can be changed. In the short term, such as between now and the general election, the Backfire Effect is a huge problem. We need to get true information to people first, before fascists get out their false information. Educating is essential, because so many people are uniformed on issues. Most people are going to tune in to the election between now and election day, so these next few months are crucial.
If we try to change the minds of fascists, in the short term we will be disappointed. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try though. People have demonstrated that it is possible to help people out of the MAGA cult, but this has been done on a case by case basis. Meanwhile, Fox News and conservative media in general blasts the airwaves with fascist propaganda. Mainstream news get it right occasionally, but a lot of the time they are still both-siding fascism. We are going to have to pick up the slack and get the word out to people on political issues. Fascists know they just have to trick people in the short term to win. We have to spread the truth to people who are sleep walking into fascism.
Ask the “Drop the T” homos and lesbos. They think giving trans people rights means it will infringe on their rights.
It’s the same train of thought as privileged white people who don’t want to treat non-whites as equals.
It’s also the logic of TERFs. Somehow, tolerance and acceptance are a zero sum game to them. Giving basic dignity to one population somehow requires taking it away from another.
It’s utter horseshit, but they believe it firmly.
Most of those guys are right-wingers trolling in an attempt to sow division.
I dunno… I mean Flat Earthers were a bunch of trolls… now look where we are.
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?
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Remember, you’re never safe, you’re just further down the list.
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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
Thank you for being part of the team! I just want to live a normal life (marry and have kids, decent living situation, some fun stuff occasionally) and it’s exhausting when a potion of the population gets so worked up about something so minor.
If they could just experience it for a day, they’d realize how…banal it is. I’ve dated a little bit of everyone, and it might make some people crestfallen to learn how similar everything is, lol.
Dating a guy is pretty much like just being best friends with a guy: the same gym days, cooking, range days, videogames, movie nights, sleepy afternoons, camping trips, etc. Sometimes, you hold hands. That’s about it xD
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”.
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.
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 moderate/centrist position between “kill the gays” and “don’t permit the killing of gays” is “kill some of the gays.”
That’s all there is to it. If you are a moderate on this issue, you’re a violent bigot.
The moderate/centrist position
Soooooo tired of people incorrectly simplifying what a centrist would believe by taking the extreme ends and picking the exact middle stance. That’s almost never how you get to a centrist view and it’s a great way to ostracize them.
A centrist on gay rights likely sees that marriage is legal, culturally it’s acceptable, so why should they fight for more rights, they’re already equal?
I don’t agree with this stance, but you’ll notice it’s not a “violent bigot” stance, just an ignorant one.
Which is true, but the apparent centrists give oxygen to the extremist position, which in turns gives that extremist view false legitimacy.
The very existence of centrism on this topic implies that there’s some kind of queer supremacy movement that has anything like the traction in popular culture that homophobia and transphobia have, which isn’t the case. There’s no centrist position, here, there’s a humanist position, and then there’s a pack of retrograde bigots and the grifters that are weaponizing them, and as soon as centrists recognize that and start outright condemning these people and their views, the better.
That’s the fallacy of the excluded middle.
The centrist position is something like “lgbt people should not be discriminated against, but trans people can’t demand to be included into women’s sports”
Let’s not pretend that everything is simple and there’s no nuance and complications in life
If the extremist position on the left is "trans women should be allowed to compete against cis women ", and the extreme position on the right is “trans people are pedophile groomers” then we have an asymmetry of viewpoints, or the middle isn’t actually where people think it is.
We also have to consider that exclusion from sports won’t get trans people killed.
I’ll further expand on this. The extremist left position is “trans women have no difference from any other kind of woman because binary gender doesn’t exist”
Extremist right positions can be just about anything, including stone the gays (see: Middle East Muslim states)
But there’s a gamut, and US conservative extremist position might be “trans people are sick in the head and you shouldn’t encourage them by pretending they are a different sex than they are”
So in both cases there’s an excluded middle of sex and gender not matching. The centrist position is people can have a different gender from their sex. This was a leftist position when I went to college, but it’s pretty much accepted by society today
A centrist on gay rights likely sees that marriage is legal, culturally it’s acceptable, so why should they fight for more rights, they’re already equal?
But they factually aren’t equal. It’s legal to discriminate against gays in a variety of ways – including in employment and, apparently, when selling business services. They are not a protected class in most places. They are directly targeted by hostile, criminalizing legislation all over the place. They aren’t fighting for MORE rights, they’re still fighting for equal rights and are far, far away from winning them.
Which means the centrist position, by your logic, is that gays should remain second-class citizens because they already got everything they need, even though it’s still factually legal to discriminate against them? That’s not actually different from the far right’s position that it should be illegal to be gay. It’s far, far away from the liberal position that people have a right to not be discriminated against. There’s no moderation in that position. It’s still the “kill some gays” position.
So no, I’m not incorrectly simplifying. I’m cutting away the bullshit. If you or anyone you know is a “centrist” on gay rights by the logic that they “already” are safe, those people are monsters. The only way to be a “centrist” in the way you have described is to be upsettingly ignorant. And if the entire philosophy of centrism is that these people are too ignorant to form a cognizant moral position, what are we even talking about?
You’re the type of person who makes claims that are not true, hurting the cause
It’s not legal to discriminate based on sexual orientation in employment
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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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