“I have believed that just as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. predicted, the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice. Until now.For the first time since the poll began four years ago, support for L.G.B.T.Q. people has dropped, in all seven areas that the survey measured. They include “having an L.G.B.T. person at my place of worship” (24 percent of Americans are “very” or “somewhat” uncomfortable), seeing a same-sex couple holding hands (31 percent are uncomfortable) and “learning my child has an L.G.B.T. teacher at school” (37 percent are uncomfortable).
The increase in these numbers over years previous is not dramatic — 3 percent in some instances, two in others. What’s significant is not the margin of increase but the fact that the numbers are going up instead of down. And in the past year, the number of L.G.B.T.Q. people reporting discrimination on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity has jumped 11 percent — to 55 percent in 2017 from 44 percent in 2016.
The reason for the change is not hard to discern. Week by week, tweet by tweet, Mr. Trump has normalized all of our worst impulses — and the routine expression of homophobia and transphobia. Mr. Trump’s administration sided with the right to discriminate against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans in the Masterpiece Cake case before the Supreme Court; he declared a new policy removing L.G.B.T.Q. people from the 2020 census; he failed to even mention gay people on World AIDS Day; and he attempted (although so far has failed) to ban trans people from the military. And of course, he made Mike Pence his vice president, a man who, as a congressional candidate, endorsed conversion therapy and who, as governor of Indiana, defunded H.I.V./AIDs testing and prevention — an action that may well have led to a record outbreak of the disease in that state.”
Opinion | Is America Growing Less Tolerant on L.G.B.T.Q. Rights?
Queer Math 