A majority of Republicans now say same-sex relations are immoral after a year of 'groomer' attacks on the LGBTQ community
A majority of Republicans now say same-sex relations are immoral after a year of 'groomer' attacks on the LGBTQ community
Republican support for same-sex relations dropped 15% in the last year, according to a recent Gallup poll.
It's depressing how much progress has seemingly fallen apart before my eyes. I know some things are generally better than the have been. But these attacks are exhausting
Yeah, at this point, having the "if the Republicans win, my way of life is basically over" thing constantly over my head is really draining.
Agreed. I'm doing my damnedest not to catastrophize, but it's hard when one of the two major political parties in this country is running on a platform specifically demonizing and targeting my community and people like me in particular.
Yep. I’m one of the lucky trans people, in that I have enough means that been planning for months now how I’m going to escape the country if 2024 goes badly.
Right? This is fucking exhausting.
Key info:
Only 41% of Republicans say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable, according to Gallup. That is a 15% drop from 2022, the largest single-year change since Gallup began asking the question. Democratic approval also fell from 85% to 79%.
I've always said that ultimately the only people we can rely on are ourselves, the queer community.
Ive had a large amount of people lately telling me about reaching across the aisle and "killing them with kindness" etc.
It's like why. These people have no interest in listening or engaging with us in a good faith way. We have to advocate for ourselves
Why would I want to kill them with kindness when they'd much sooner kill me with a knotted rope and a sycamore?
yup. we have to raise hell ourselves, because even the non-queers who nominally support us won't always fight for us.
Please keep in mind that the demographic they're talking about don't do any critical thinking; they just parrot the latest hate-fueled diatribe from Fox/Newsmax/OAN/CNN. This is how conservative "politics" works in the US. If they aren't oppressing people, attacking workers, veterans, women, or minorities, and leveraging tax breaks for the rich on the backs of the poor, they're busy stacking the deck so they can in the future.
The GOP jump seems notable and steep, but the Democratic dip feels like it’s in line with the normal noise and variance that you get with a reoccurring survey.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/507230/fewer-say-sex-relations-morally-acceptable.aspx
You’re going to get normal peaks and valleys with a reoccurring survey. The respondent pools are never identical year over year. And with progressives, who skew younger and don’t answer phone surveys, you’re going to have even more noise.
You relied on republicans?!
I think the point is that there was also a dip with Dems. But IMHO, as someone who runs a lot of surveys for a living, the key it to look at the overall trend line, not one data point. And the overall democratic trend line over the past few years seems to have some noise in it that vacillates + or - 5% from the trend line.
The GOP line though… that feels like a change from historical trend line.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/507230/fewer-say-sex-relations-morally-acceptable.aspx
No, I was pointing out that it's dropped significantly for Democrats too, and the overall point is that we can't rely on society as a whole to do/believe what's right and protect us.
This is disgusting. 8 years ago people where getting to the point where they would say "why did it take us so long?" Now it's sharply sliding backwards.
Just like the GOP with climate change. Full on aggressive denialism is back on the menu. Now that people are in echo chambers, reality can be whatever you want it to be.
Link to the study and infographics https://news.gallup.com/poll/507230/fewer-say-sex-relations-morally-acceptable.aspx
And here is the historical data chart
My 2¢ as someone who runs a lot of sentiment surveys…
I could be wrong, but the Dem dip feels like it could be normal survey noise. It seems to go up and down about 4 to 5% from the historical trend line. Also, progressives are kind of a bit more of a noisy respondent group. You have less old folks, less land lines, less people with the time / energy to talk to researchers.
The GOP dip though… that looks like it’s abnormal compared to the historical trend line.
Huh, I think Republicans are immoral after decades of actual grooming and convictions.
Let's not forget the time they attacked our country on Jan. 6. Republicans are traitors to America. And on basically every other choice between good and evil they'll choose evil every time, whether that be about treason, environmental protection, democracy, women's rights, any kind of minority right, the economy, even the fucking metric system, they always choose the worst thing.
It's almost like they've been a fifth column working to destroy us from the inside all along.
As heinous as their child predation and corruption of office have been, war profiteering, bonded labor exploitation, global pollution, suppression of harm assessment science and pushing deadly addictive pharmaceuticals all put their immorality at an exponentially higher scale.
god damn right
Anyone who is a Republican at this point is actively supporting the white power / Christian nationalist movement and the fascist takeover. That is to say, they're in support of the purification movement and genocide whether or not they personally believe in the culture war or are a fiscal conservative loyalist.
43 years of failed fiscal conservative policy only served to accelerate the Republican party toward fascism and the Trump takeover of the GOP during the 2015-2016 primary. So it essentially was fascism all along.
I'm not surprised. They can't win at anything else, so they create an artifical wedge issue to splinter multiple coalitions of voters while simultaneously making it more difficult for them to vote. This makes the republican party stronger despite their support being largely anemic. Gerrymandering doesn't help, but democrats don't vote in high enough numbers.
They will continue to pry away women, queer people, and POC while simultaneously shouting that "voting won't do anything, why even bother?" To standard groups. And young people will buy it and think the only way to change is through protests, not voting.
There. I just disassembled the republican playbook in 5 minutes. Watch it work.
Demoralization of a populace is one of the main tactics by any group that is anti-democratic. The rhetoric is different when targeting either right or left, but the tactics and goals are essentially the same.
Soviet KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, outlined explicitly how countries like the Soviet Union (and now Russia and China) have been pursuing a long-term campaign of demoralizing American citizens and attempting to manufacture disillusionment with democracy.
It's important to keep in the back of your mind when having interactions online. We know, obviously, of how the right was demoralized through the Teabag and MAGA movements, which were organized in no small part with the help of Russian astroturfing and troll farms on social media, but the left is not immune to these kinds of tactics either.
The amount of times on Reddit I saw supposedly left-wing people claiming the only solution in the US was violent revolution and anarchy and that our democratic institutions are not salvageable was very telling.
Whatever political demographic you might fall into, never labor under the illusion that you cannot be a target of bad actors in this way.
The question is worded in terms of morality, not acceptability within society. I might find non-veganism immoral, but I rarely mention this fact to others, and while I have lived a vegan lifestyle for almost 7 years now, I make no suggestion to others on the subject unless prompted directlt in conversation. If many Republicans feel that same-sex relationships are immoral, this may primarily impact their attitudes towards their own lives and not how they see those of others.
Furthermore, less than 50% support doesn't mean over 50% direct rejection. Plenty of individuals don't know what to think and will let anything happen as they drift through their lives. Thus, this statistic alone isn't enough to conclude that most Republicans are against same-sex relationships.
I think this is actually pretty clear and useful information on Republican support for same-sex relationships - what-abouting between 'moral' and 'acceptable' isn't useful here, particularly when you take this research in the (very important) context of recent lawmaking around rainbow communities.
My point is mainly that it does not mean that over 50% of Republicans want to put gay people behind bars, which can easily be concluded from something like this. I think it represents a general attitude but isn't a concerning statistic on its own.
Your comment on the context of current legislation is a good way of conceptualizing the data, but nonetheless I don't think that 43% acceptance is bad. Adding in probably 90%+ of acceptance from Democrats, the average is still well over 50% in most areas, so saying that a characteristically anti-LGBT group is anti-LGBT is not too concerning.
Either way, it's obviously important to be aware of political trends, and I don't want to discourage a high level of awareness. The swift erosion of rights in the US is cincerning enough for me to start learning German with a general idea of moving to Switzerland.
Thank you for commenting.
I think your putting a lot on most understanding the nuance of moral vs acceptable.
Black and white thinking, lack of critical thinking and appeals to populism are the mainstay of current discourse.
That's definitely true, especially in the US. In the context of recent developments, I can see how the decrease itself is concerning.
Why are Republicans so hypocritical?
To Republicans it's about loyalty over principle. Everyone who is part of the movement gets the benefit of doubt while anyone else is an enemy.
Of course this hasn't stopped infighting within the Republican party, so they're now factioning and fighting among themselves as well, each sect claiming to be the true base of the Republican party.
At this point I'd take bets on when the first news stories like "Republicans declare any *-sexual relations immoral". Homo, hetero, cis, LGBTQ+, asexual, metrosexual, whatever. Anything regarding penises, vaginas, and anything "inbetween".
It cannot be that far in the future anymore.
In the survey conducted last month, just 41% of Republicans said that gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable, a 15% drop from 2022.
So, 59% ambivalent or against.
Given 73% of red team adherents strongly believe in God therefore have strong religious adherence, we're still trending better than expected.
Of these, given the outsize skew toward red team from Evangelical Protestant and Mormon groups, it should be unsurprising a party with a strong representation of outspoken religious bigots is skewing toward bigotry. Disappointing, sure, but unsurprising.
Independents who say same-sex relations are morally acceptable has remained steady in recent years, with 73% expressing approval in 2023 compared to 72% the year before, according to Gallup.
Independents showing a detachment from a given team's trend change is always good to see.
Overall, 64% of Americans still say that gay or lesbian relations are "morally acceptable," including 79% of Democrats and 73% of self-described independents, according to the Gallup poll.
Americans have come a long way since 2001, when just 40% of respondents to the same poll expressed approval of same-sex relations.
And we're still trending far improved from where we were in the early days of the acceptance movement.
They claim to believe in God but they just believe in money and fuck everybody else. One cannot be a Republican and a moral individual at the same time. They're incompatible at the most fundamental level.