After years of progress on gay rights, how did the US become so anti-LGBTQ+?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

51% : Widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage rights, gay people serving in the military and the need for protections for LGBTQ+ people followed.
43% : As same-sex marriage is now part of the fabric of America, conservatives have chosen to exploit Americans' unfamiliarity with trans people and piggyback on parental anger over the perceived overreach of Covid-era school closures, conflating it with an insidious sense of "wokeness", in the hopes of finding an electorally viable sluiceway for anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria.
41% : The demise of the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act in 2013 was followed by the end of the federal ban on marriage equality in 2015.
41% : The most famous of these anti-LGBTQ+ laws is the piece of Florida legislation banning instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in schools between kindergarten and third grade, the so-called "don't say gay" law.
41% :For her, the catalyst was when Texas Republicans such as Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton, the governor and attorney general, not only banned gender-affirming medical care for trans youth but reframed their parents as child abusers, Paxton signing a 13-page legal opinion that parents or doctors who helped children transition were abusers who should be investigated by law enforcement.
37% : People are running on insane nonsense, like trans people should face a firing squad," says Rhodes-Short, referring to to Robert Foster, a former Mississippi lawmaker and gubernatorial candidate who said that anyone "advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty by firing squad".

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.