Majority of Americans back LGBTQ protections — but support is slidingby Tom Fitzsimmons, NBC News
March 26, 2019
A majority of Americans across every state and almost every demographic support LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections, according to a poll released Tuesday by the nonprofit research firm Public Religion Research Institute.
The nonpartisan organization's "American Values Atlas" survey found that 69 percent of Americans support "broad nondiscrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people." That includes majorities in all major religions, from 90 percent of Unitarian/Universalists to 53 percent of Jehovah's Witnesses.
The report notes that attitudes toward this political question are highly segmented by age: A majority, 63 percent, of white evangelical Protestants ages 18-29 support nondiscrimination laws, while 45 percent of those ages 65 and older do. A version of that age gap — younger people expressing greater LGBTQ support than their older coreligionists — exists across many religious groups, according to the report, including black Protestants, white mainline Protestants, white Catholics, Hispanic Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated.
The poll also queried respondents about an unsettled area of constitutional law: whether small businesses may refuse to serve LGBTQ people because of their religious beliefs. While 57 percent of Americans oppose allowing business to discriminate, respondents from two major religious groups — white evangelical Protestants and Mormons — support allowing it, at 55 percent and 54 percent, respectively.
The report states that, "while determining causality between events in the news and public opinion is notoriously difficult," opposition to religiously based service refusals of gay and lesbian people declined "across virtually every demographic" in the two months after the highly publicized Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly ruled in favor of religious baker Jack Phillips who had refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
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