Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender Political Participation Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons participated in electoral politics as voters, activists, and candidates. Of these activities, voting in elections is the most widespread form of political participation of all citizens in liberal democratic societies. The study of how both individuals and groups in society vote (for whom they vote and why) is the study of voting behavior.

Related to voting behavior are the questions of how LGBT candidates and issues have fared when facing the electorate and how state referenda seeking to extend or curtail gay rights have fared. Since the 1930s, electoral voting behavior has been analyzed by comparing certain demographic characteristics of voters and their patterns of support or opposition for issues and candidates. Some of the most common demographic characteristics included by political polls are race, ethnicity, gender, income, education, class, and religion. Historically, what were not included were questions regarding a voter’s sexual identity or sexual orientation.

LGBT Candidates

It is impossible to know historically how many LGBT elected officials have served in office in any nation. But in the 1970s, as public attention to gay rights grew, more LGBT candidates presented themselves for election. As early as 1961, José Sarriaran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and lost, but his candidacy helped to encourage greater LGBT involvement in politics. Some sixteen years later, Harvey Milk would win a seat on the same Board of Supervisors. In 1974, three years prior to Milk’s election in San Francisco, Kathy Kozachenko was elected to the Ann Arbor, Michigan, City Council, making her the first openly gay elected official in the United States. Elaine Noble followed a few months later as the first openly gay state legislator, serving in the Massachusetts legislature from 1975 to 1979. In 2008, in Silverton, Oregon, voters elected the first openly transgender public official when they chose Stu Rasmussen to serve as town mayor.

As of 2009, there were currently three openly gay U.S. House members (eight others have previously been elected), and the number of LGBT elected officials grew from less than fifty to more than 450 in less than two decades. The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, established in 1991, has helped many of these candidates with fundraising and professional campaign support. In 2009 alone, they endorsed seventy-six openly LGBT candidates, the largest in their history. To receive support, candidates must demonstrate community support and a realistic plan to win; support federal, state, or local LGBT civil rights legislation; and, via the legislative or regulatory process, support privacy and reproductive rights. Between 2006 and 2008 more than 70 percent of the candidates endorsed by the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund were elected, a percentage that has been growing since the mid-1990s.

While each year more LGBT candidates join the ranks of the more than five hundred thousand elected officials in the United States, they continue to face significant obstacles to election including explicitly homophobic campaigns. Despite significant progress in electoral politics, very few districts remain in which LGBT candidates are safe from such antigay attacks.

Electoral Participation

In the past twenty years, LGBT participation and activism has grown at the federal, state, and local levels. Beginning with the 1992 campaign for president, LGBT activists began to organize and fundraise for then-candidate Bill Clinton, who had pledged to end the ban against gays and lesbians in the military. He was the first major party candidate to add an openly gay advisor to his campaign team, and LGBT citizens came out to work on his campaign as they had never before. Some survey data suggest that the LGBT vote helped Clinton to win in Michigan and New Jersey, as well as gave him a comfortable margin of victory in California and New York.

A new hopefulness for the future LGBT inclusion in mainstream politics quickly faded, however, as President Clinton failed to lift the military ban and in 1996 signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), defining marriage as an act exclusively between one man and one woman. DOMA also provided that “no state needs to treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if the relationship is considered a marriage in another state.”

This second provision fueled an already ongoing explosion of LGBT activity at the state level as gay activists sought to pass civil liberties protections at the local level at the same time that anti-LGBT activists began to attack such provisions and outlaw future civil rights protections for gays through ballot initiatives and referenda. In 1992, in both Colorado and Oregon, voters were asked to codify a denial of equal protection for LGBT citizens into law. Although the Oregon measure failed and the Colorado amendment was declared unconstitutional by the Colorado and U.S. Supreme Courts, states continue to put the civil rights protections for LGBT citizens to a vote of the population. Six months after gay couples began to marry in Massachusetts in May 2003, eleven states voted on election night to ban gay marriage in their states. By 2009, thirty states had passed bans against gay marriage either through referenda or state legislative action, including a stunning 2008 state referenda defeat in California where gay marriage had previously been legal. More than any other minority group in history, LGBT persons in the United States have had their civil rights protections put to popular vote. Despite the high percentage of the population that tell surveyors that they believe in civil rights protections for gay people, in specific ballot questions, the anti-LGBT activists have continued to strip away or prohibit the passage or expansion of such protections.

LGBT Voting Behavior

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as increasing numbers of candidates identifying as LGBT emerged, pollsters, potential candidates, elected officials, newspapers, and researchers all began to argue for the inclusion of sexual identity as a demographic category in political surveys. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many major polls began to include these questions, but the data generated often came with serious caveats—some of which still exist today. The first problem paralleled a debate in LGBT scholarship that raged throughout the 1990s, when concerns emerged about what this new gay/lesbian/bisexual (GLB) variable measured. Was GLB a measure of personal identity, sexual acts, political coalition, or a combination of these factors? The second and more enduring problem is that it is probable that many LGBT persons are unwilling to identify themselves as sexual minorities to pollsters visiting the neighborhood polling stations where they live, creating a conjectured under sampling of their political perspectives and viewpoints, while possibly simultaneously skewing the results reported by heterosexual voters. Problems remain today: only 3 percent to 5 percent of voters identify themselves as GLB to pollsters. Most surveys do not include transgender as a demographic category, still further compounding any efforts to include transgender voter preferences. As a result of these problems, very few studies of LGBT voting behavior have been undertaken. The data that do exist are revealing, however. In national exit polls from 1992 through 2004, GLB voters were significantly more liberal in their social attitudes and reported votes than their heterosexual counterparts. Within this GLB group, lesbians are the most liberal, and, in one 1996 study of voting behavior, this has been attributed to the impact of feminism. There was little difference between lesbians and gay men who identified as feminists while lesbians who did not identify as feminist held opinions that were much closer to their nonfeminist gay counterparts.

Recent polling data continue to suggest that GLB respondents are among the most progressive on social issues and are much more likely to support Democratic Party candidates. While Barack Obama won the presidential election with 52.9 percent of the vote, exit polls show that more than 70 percent of GLB voters chose him to be president. In a 2008 American National Election Studies Time Series survey of likely voters prior to the election, more than 80 percent of GLB voters preferred Obama. In the same poll, 58 percent of GLB voters supported national health care compared to 50.6 percent of “straight” voters. A significant 47.5 percent of GLB voters supported abortion under any circumstances compared to 39.5 percent of non-GLB voters. And most significantly, 68 percent favored a citizenship process for illegal aliens, while only 48 percent of their heterosexual counterparts favored such a process.

LGBT voters, activists, and candidates continue to be a growing part of the American political landscape. In some cities and urban areas, it is not possible to win election without their votes. As anti-LGBT referenda and ballot questions persist in the politicization of sexual orientation, group solidarity and political mobilization of LGBT voters will remain high, resulting in increased political activism, political participation, and fund raising within LGBT communities.

Bibliography:

American National Election Studies 2008 Time Series Study. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, May 2009, www.icpsr. umich.edu.
Edison Media Research. National Election Pool Exit Poll. A coalition of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC, and the Associated Press, 2008, www.cnn.com/ ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=USP00p3.
Haeberle, Steven H. “Gay and Lesbian Rights: Emerging Trends in Public Opinion and Voting Behavior.” In Gays and Lesbians in the Democratic Process: Public Policy, Public Opinion, and Political Representation. Edited by Ellen D. B. Riggle and Barry L.Tadlock, 146–169. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Hertzog, Mark. The Lavender Vote: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Bisexuals in American Electoral Politics. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

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