After many decades of horrible discrimination against the LGBT community by most in this country, the results of this latest poll are refreshing. It shows Americans have grown up, and they now strongly support extending equal rights to members of the LGBT community.
Americans now support legal same-sex marriages by a 29 point margin, want businesses to be kept from discriminating against LGBT individuals on the basis of religion by a 32 point margin, want LGBT rights to be protected in housing, jobs, and public accommodations by a 44 point margin, and oppose laws restricting transgendered individuals to using bathrooms according to their birth gender by a 14 point margin.
A full 61% of Americans say there is still a lot of discrimination against LGBT individuals in the U.S., and they don't like it.
Those are some nice statistics. Maybe Americans are finally starting to realize that equal rights is not a zero-sum game -- that insuring equal rights for others does not diminish their own rights.
These charts were made from information in a recent Public Religion Research Institute Poll -- done between February 10th and 19th of a random national sample of 2,031 adults, with a 2.6 point margin of error.
