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Is there a youth backlash brewing against LGBT?
I came up out of the subway the other day, and nearly my entire field of view was filled by a massive glowing screen full of flapping pride flags, wall-to-wall and six feet tall. It was a project by some charity or other claiming that "hate crimes" (or victimization, or incidents, or whatever they measure) jump by 60% during pride month. I've been so burned out by the sight of that flag everywhere that the only reaction I can muster is "maybe stop being so obnoxious about it then?" From the POSIWID perspective, one could consider the purpose of pride month to be to spike hostility against LGBT people, so why do it?
A long tweet from sci-fi author Devon Eriksen claims that pride month is downstream of the "toaster fucker" problem, in reference to an ancient greentext. Condensed: the internet brings together people with bizarre niche interests (what he calls "toaster fuckers" — he claims it's meant to be a general term but he's clearly writing about the LGBT theater of the CW). A supportive online community stops these people from leaving the toaster in the kitchen and adjusting to the normal world around them, and instead these online groups metastasize, eventually spilling over into the wider world: intra-group status competitions start with "who can fuck the most toasters", lead to "'toaster-fucker pride' bumper stickers" and then "bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too" and "swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking."
I think I agree with some of that description but not all of it, and may write it up in another thread if I get time, but it's not so important for this post. I need it as context for the bit that I think is more accurate: the normies getting fed up with all the toaster-fucking, the backlash, and the response (lightly edited to concatenate multiple small tweets, but no words changed):
I think this explains the split in normie opinion pretty well: red states have had more than enough and that's led into the various legal battles that Devon alludes to, school choice advocacy, campaigns to replace progressive school boards, etc. I don't think I've seen "beaten with fenceposts"-level backlash (I figure it would pop up here if it was an issue), but even the memory of such events in the semi-recent past could explain normie "I want to be a good person so I'll call myself an ally"-ism. Compare the number of "racist hate crime" hoaxes over the past few years, to the point where "the demand for racism exceeds its supply" has become a dark joke among cynical online commentators. I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents (certainly none as badly as Jussie Smollett did), but it seems useful for a group to have opposition to keep its supporters energized ("our work is not yet done!") and I could definitely see obnoxious pride month displays as accidentally serving this function.
Onto youth. A recent tweet by a newish Twitter account, America_2100, claims a drop in support for LGBT over the past few years (2022–2023: US-wide: -7 points; Republicans: -15 points, to a 10-year low of 41%; Democrats: -6 points; "young people": -8 points). In particular, they claim Gen Z's support for gay marriage dropped by 11 points between 2021 and 2023, which is double the time span of the other stats but could indicate an ongoing decline in support. Unfortunately the tweet doesn't source the surveys it refers to beyond saying that it came from PRRI and I don't have hard data beyond a couple of anecdotes. Lime, a scooter rental company, made a pride-flag crosswalk in Washington a 'walk-the-scooter' zone after several teenagers were arrested for leaving skid marks on it. I saw a recent comment on a gaming subreddit (sorry, I can't find it), in response to yet another pride-month-themed mod, saying something like "don't be discouraged! 50% upvotes for a pride mod is pretty good these days". But when I interact with university students, the discourse is still very pro-LGBT: they talking about being excited for pride events, etc.
So, questions for the floor:
I wish the tweet cited its sources because the data I can find does not seem to support this. Here is Gallup in 2021 and 2023. The total US number is up 1 percentage point (71 in 2023 vs 70 in 2021). Republicans are down about 6 percentage points (55 to 49) but Democrats (83 to 84) and independents (73 to 78) are up. The age groups are not quite comparable across these two polls but taking the lowest age group (18-29 in 2023, 18-34 in 2021) support for gay marriage has increased (84 to 89). Just eyeballing the age based changes I think they are more a composition effect of how the ranges have changed but none of them show a decline.
On the other hand a PRRI report from this year does show Gen Z being mildly less supportive of LGBT rights than millennials, though the still the second-most supportive generation.
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I would be hard pressed to answer this survey, because I believe that the Masterpiece Cakeshop lawsuits were determined correctly, but also that no business has a right to turn away an LGBT person from receiving the same service as everyone else.
I am pretty anti-LGBT, as that goes today. I don't believe that two members of the same sex can be married in the same sense of the word "marriage" as I use when I say my marriage, my parents', grandparents', or great grandparents' marriage. Homosexual marriage is just talking about a completely different thing that can't even accidentally turn into the referent I mean.
If I was a wedding photographer and someone wanted me to photograph a gay wedding, I would want the right to refuse based on I don't believe the two events are even similar. It would be the equivalent of if I were a professional photographer that specialized in Christian First Communions, Confirmations, and Baptisms, then refused to be hired to photograph a Satanic Mass desecrating those things. "But the government says they are both equivalent religious expressions!" I don't care.
I'm pretty pro-LGBT, as far as that would have gone in the 80s or earlier. People deserve healthcare, non-discrimination in the necessities of daily life, security in their homes and jobs. I believe homosexuality is largely due to forces outside people's control. Having those attractions is not a moral failure. All of these would have been radical a hundred years ago, now they are the bare minimum of decency that only the smallest, most fringe groups would deny. The LGBT movement won there. Can they accept that victory and move on?
This is also my point of view, but I add to it that I'm skeptical most of the LGBT-identification among young people is the sort of homosexuality that is largely due to forces outside people's control. It seems pretty clear that social contagion can shift people's sexual orientation or at least move them to decreased revulsion towards sexual activity they once may have found unappealing. My impression is that there's a small subset -- maybe 1, 2% -- that is gay due to developmental or neonatal factors, with maybe some genetic predisposion factors in there that we just don't understand. But that's wildly different from the much higher rates not only of LGBT identification but LGBT activity among younger people. And it absolutely changes the state of the debate over things like gay marriage if only a very small part of the population is gay than if a much larger proportion is.
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