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.
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