3.20.19 LGBT Nondiscrimination Protections: Popular but Not Widely Adopted
| LGBT Nondiscrimination Protections: Popular but Not Widely Adopted Despite broad support for LGBT nondiscrimination protections, the nation is still far from universally implemented protections. A new PRRI survey shows nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) Americans support making nondiscrimination laws LGBT-inclusive, including majorities in all 50 states. Despite strong support at the national and state level, only 34 states and Washington D.C. have passed some type of legislation protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people from discrimination. Of the 16 states that don’t have laws protecting against discrimination for sexual orientation and/or gender identity, only North Dakota has support higher than the national average (72 percent). In 11 states with nondiscrimination laws, residents support LGBT protection below the national average. However, seven of these states have support at 68 percent. |
| Top NYC School Accepts Only 7 Black Students Stuyvesant High School, one of New York City’s top schools, accepted 895 students for its 2019 freshman class. Of that 895, just seven are black. The school has since drawn scrutiny from several prominent lawmakers, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). “To only have 7 Black students accepted into Stuyvesant (a public high school) tells us that this is a system failure,” Ocasio- Cortez tweeted. “Education inequity is a major factor in the racial wealth gap. This is what injustice looks like.” According to PRRI data from 2018, 23 percent of the country say that they interact with people of a different racial or ethnic background in a school their children are attending. A 2017 poll of young people age 15-24 shows that 72 percent believe that there is a lot of discrimination against black people in the United States. |
| White Evangelicals are Holding on to Donald Trump A new piece in Axios examines the likelihood that white evangelical Protestants will vote for President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Evangelicals have long been one of Trump’s most reliable voting bloc, and that does not look to change soon. “White evangelicals consistently have a disproportionate impact on elections and were key to Trump’s 2016 victory. They only made up 15 percent of the population in 2018, but accounted for more than a quarter of midterm voters,” according to Robert Jones, the CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. “Ahead of 2020, Trump remains their favorite candidate,” writes Stef W. Kight. More recent PRRI data shows that 68 percent of white evangelical Protestants have a favorable opinion of the president, compared to 48 percent of white mainline Protestants, 35 percent of Catholics (and 47 percent of white non-Hispanic Catholics), 21 percent of nonwhite Protestants, and 21 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans. |
| Is the Electoral College Based in Racism? Corey Hutchins of The Colorado Independent looks at the history of the electoral college and its connection to slavery in a new edition of his reader mailbag. In 1800, Hutchins notes that Thomas Jefferson was elected, in part, due to the increased voting power of southern states that counted non-voting slaves among the population. According to Hutchins, John Adams would have been re-elected president had the popular vote (of free white males) prevailed. Of the current electoral landscape, he writes, “a poll in the summer of 2018 conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found 65 percent of U.S. voters, nearly two-thirds, think the national popular vote is the better way to pick presidents. Pollsters there found the popular vote ‘particularly popular among black Americans.’” |