LGBTQ Identification

 Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

- Gallup’s latest update on LGBTQ+ identification finds 9.3% of U.S. adults identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual in 2024. This represents an increase of more than a percentage point versus the prior estimate, from 2023. Longer term, the figure has nearly doubled since 2020 and is up from 3.5% in 2012, when Gallup first measured it.

Religious Denominations, Parties, and Service Refusals

 From the Public Religion Research Institute:

Majorities of Americans consistently oppose religiously based refusals to serve gay and lesbian people, and nearly two-thirds (66%) opposed such refusals in 2021. About one-third of Americans (33%) support such religiously based service refusals, including 13% who strongly favor them. Unlike on the other issues in this report, opposition to religiously based refusals to serve gay and lesbian people has shown negative and positive fluctuations since 2015, when 59% opposed this policy. Opposition to refusing service stayed about the same in 2016 (61%) and 2017 (60%), then ticked slightly down, to 57% in 2018 and 56% in 2019. In 2020, opinion shifted back to the 2016 level (61%), and 2021 shows a significant increase again.[11]

Nearly nine in ten Democrats (85%) and two-thirds of independents (66%) oppose religiously based refusals to serve gay and lesbian people. About four in ten Republicans (44%) oppose such service refusals, compared to a majority (56%) who support them. Opposition to religiously based service refusals has increased among all partisans since 2015, when 74% of Democrats, 59% of independents, and 40% of Republicans opposed religiously based service refusals.

Majorities of almost every major religious group oppose religiously based service refusals, including 82% of Unitarian Universalists, 80% of religiously unaffiliated Americans, 79% of other Catholics of color, 78% of members of other religions, 77% of Muslims, 76% of Jewish Americans, 75% of Buddhists, 75% of Hindus, 74% of Hispanic Catholics, 71% of Black Protestants, 66% of Hispanic Protestants, 65% of white Catholics, 63% of white mainline Protestants, and 58% of other Protestants of color. Less than half of Jehovah’s Witnesses (49%), Latter-Day Saints (44%), Orthodox Christians (43%), and white evangelical Protestants (38%) oppose religiously based service refusals.[12]

 

LGBT Identification

 Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

Gallup's latest update on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender identification finds 5.6% of U.S. adults identifying as LGBT. The current estimate is up from 4.5% in Gallup's previous update based on 2017 data.

Currently, 86.7% of Americans say they are heterosexual or straight, and 7.6% do not answer the question about their sexual orientation. Gallup's 2012-2017 data had roughly 5% "no opinion" responses.

The latest results are based on more than 15,000 interviews conducted throughout 2020 with Americans aged 18 and older. Gallup had previously reported annual updates from its 2012-2017 daily tracking survey data, but did not routinely measure LGBT identification in 2018 or 2019.

Bostock v. Clayton County

Justice Gorsuch's majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County:

Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them. In our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There, in Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.

Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the Act’s consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male
employees. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

David Beavers and Daniel Lippman at Politico Influence:

CHAMBER CHEERS SUPREME COURT RULING: Among those cheering the Supreme Court’s ruling this morning that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars discrimination against LGBTQ workers: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber “is pleased that, as a result of today’s Supreme Court ruling, federal law prohibits discrimination in the workplace against gay, lesbian and transgender employees,” Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s chief policy officer, said in a statement. “Consistent with our support for H.R. 5 (116), the Equality Act, the U.S. Chamber believes protecting American workers from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation or national origin is absolutely essential to fulfilling the promise of equality that is fundamental to American life.”