With rising support for marriage equality and the LGBTQ community comes a bit of a distorted view on the issues of discrimination those within the community still face.
According to a new report from FiveThirtyEight, “only 55 percent of Americans believe that gay and lesbian people face a lot of discrimination in the U.S., down from 68 percent in 2013.”
But those numbers may be skewed, depending on how the person responding is surveyed. According to the same article, a 2014 report “found that Americans were 14 points less likely to say gays and lesbians experience a lot of discrimination when responding to an online survey than when a pollster called them.”
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What’s more, an increasing number of Americans seem to be believing the idea that fighting for LGBTQ rights is largely unnecessary. A 2017 Gallup survey found that 46 percent of people do not think “news (sic) civil rights laws are needed to reduce discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people.” A 2018 survey from PRRI revealed that 49 percent believe the U.S. “has made the changes needed to give gay and lesbian people equal fights with other Americans.”
It’s nice that people believe LGBT citizens have been given the rights to make them equal with other Americans, but it’s simply not the case, especially when you consider that new rights don’t always mean increased acceptance. In fact, anti-LGBTQ hate crimes rose 3 percent in 2017, according to the FBI. Of the 1,470 victims who “were involved in 1,249 separate bias incidents,” close to 60 percent were against gay men and 25 percent were against “a mix of LGBTQ people.”
The number of hate crimes in the U.S. against those in the LGBTQ community has increased every year since 2014.
This article was originally published March 21, 2019.
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