Young adults and LGBT discomfort

Contrary to popular perceptions, young Americans’ comfort with LGBT individuals declined last year, according to a survey released this week by media monitoring organization GLAAD.

GLAAD, formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, has been conducting the survey since 2014. It asks 2,000 U.S. adults about their level of comfort with seven situations: learning a family member is LGBT, learning my doctor is LGBT, having LGBT members at my place of worship, seeing a LGBT co-worker’s wedding picture, seeing a same-sex couple holding hands, having my child placed in a class with a LGBT teacher, and learning my child has a lesson on LGBT history in school.

The first three years of the survey showed growing comfort among non-LGBT respondents, who have been a steady 88 percent of those surveyed. But in 2017, the results swung the other direction. Discomfort increased across the board for non-LGBT individuals in all seven situations by 2 to 3 percentage points. The percentage of non-LGBTQ adults reporting being “very” or “somewhat” comfortable across all the seven scenarios—GLAAD calls them “allies”—dropped to 49 percent from a high of 53 percent in 2016.

Overall, the most recent results were very similar to 2017. The rate of “allies” stayed steady at 49 percent. But the rate of young adults aged 18-34 who are comfortable across all seven scenarios dropped from 53 to 45 percent. The drop is especially pronounced in personal situations, like learning a family member, doctor, or child’s teacher is LGBT.

The GLAAD report attributed the change to the rise of divisive rhetoric in politics and culture since President Donald Trump was elected. It claimed young people are being swept up into anti-LGBT violence and discrimination.

A cultural embrace of coarse rhetoric could be one of many explanations, said Andrew T. Walker, a senior fellow in Christian ethics for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. But he cautioned that it’s too simplistic to blame any one factor. People might sympathize more now with Christians who have had to fight for religious liberty, such as Colorado baker Jack Phillips or Washington state florist Baronnelle Stutzman, whose Biblical beliefs about marriage and sexuality kept them from serving same-sex weddings. Or people might be realizing the internal contradictions of the LGBT movement itself.

“You cannot have feminism and transgenderism coexist because feminism assumes a stable definition of womanhood and femininity, and transgenderism completely explodes those stable concepts,” Walker said. “And moreover, the transgender movement contradicts the LGB argument, because for homosexuality to exist it actually has to mean that stable biological males love and are attracted to other biological males.”

Walker also pointed to cultural fatigue with overbearing zealotry on the radical fringes of the LGBT movement, as well as conscience exhaustion. You don’t have to be a Christian to think it strange to have biological men in women’s restrooms, he said, or “to understand that it seems a little bit illogical to have biological males competing with females and beating them in track athletic events.”

Walker’s takeaway: Christians should love and promote the dignity of their LGBT neighbors but not apologize for Biblical teaching, and they certainly should “not invest either their hopes or their fears in one single poll.”