LGBTQ+ Community Equality

Since the mid-twentieth century, political activism and legal advocacy have made significant gains in advancing equality for the LGBTQ+ community in the United States. This diverse community includes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, and others with a broad range of sexual orientations and gender identities. Public opinion and policy have evolved alongside these gains. Support for marriage equality for LGBTQ+ people, for example, dramatically increased from the 1980s into the twenty-first century. Several states maintained laws against same-sex marriage until 2015 when the Supreme Court ruled such prohibitions unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 2020 the Supreme Court ruled that LGBTQ+ employees are protected by federal law under the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on sex....