A Strong Majority of Voters Support the Equality Act
By McKenzie Wilson and Lew Blank
Last week, 16-year-old Stella Keating became the first transgender teenager to testify at a Senate hearing. In her speech, she described the devastating toll of anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination on the lives of herself and millions of Americans:
“Less than half of the states in our country provide equal protection for me under the law. What happens if I want to attend college in a state that doesn’t protect me? Right now, I could be denied medical care or be evicted for simply being transgender in many states,” she said. “Every person...regardless of who they are or who they love, should be able to be excited about their future.”
The Equality Act — which passed the House last month and is currently being debated in the Senate — is a landmark proposal that, if passed, would be the first federal law preventing discrimination against people like Keating who identify as LGBTQIA+. The bill would explicitly ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, directly addressing an issue that has oppressed and marginalized the LGBTQIA+ community for decades. About one-third of LGBTQIA+ Americans report experiencing workplace discrimination, and about one-half report experiencing discrimination in public spaces.
The bill would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to explicitly classify LGBTQIA+ Americans as a group that’s protected from discrimination. Perhaps most importantly, it would also expand the Civil Rights Act’s anti-discrimination protections to include federally-funded programs and “public accommodations” like stores, hotels, transportation services, and rental establishments.
While the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020 effectively included members of the LGBTQIA+ community under the Civil Rights Act’s protections, these protections only cover certain sectors like housing, employment, and education. Without the passage of the Equality Act, some states would still be able to permit anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination in business practices, religious facilities, and a variety of other spaces. The Equality Act would close these gaps, and also make it far more difficult to overturn the progress won by the Bostock decision.
In a recent Data for Progress survey, we asked a national sample of likely voters whether they’d support legislation to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. We find a clear 38-point margin of support (66 percent support, 28 percent opposed) for this proposal. Importantly, both Democrats and Independents are overwhelmingly on board, favoring this legislation by margins of 76-points and 50-points, respectively.
Despite the fact that the Equality Act simply provides basic, much-needed protections for a community facing immense levels of discrimination, Republican senators have stopped at nothing to campaign and crusade against it. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said this week that he’d “talk until [he] fell over” to prevent the Equality Act from overcoming the filibuster. Meanwhile, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) called it “supremacy of gays.” Yet Data for Progress’ polling makes clear that Republicans’ attacks on the Equality Act are falling flat.
While the Equality Act passed the House on a mostly party-line vote, it’s unlikely to pass the Senate without procedural reform. Currently, the bill would require 60 votes (including ten Republicans) to overcome the filibuster — unless Democrats take steps to overturn these long-outdated Senate procedures.
With an urgent need to comprehensively and explicitly protect the LGBTQIA+ community from discrimination, and with a substantial majority of Americans favoring these protections, Senate Democrats should make a strong, active push to pass the Equality Act, even if it requires reforming Senate procedure.
McKenzie Wilson (@McKenzieAWilson) is the Communications Director at Data for Progress.
Lew Blank (@LewBlank) is a senior writer at Data for Progress.
Survey Methodology:
From February 23 to February 25, 2021, Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1182 likely voters nationally using web panel respondents. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, and voting history. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error is ±3 percentage points.