New Poll: African-Americans are Not Fans of RFRA

When it comes to the Indiana RFRA, the younger crowd are not trying to hear that noise. But another group is also causing a stir.

Apparently, African-Americans are the outliers when it comes to LGBT rights being taken away. Why are they/we an outlier? Well, it's assumed that the support for gay marriage and LGBT rights go hand in hand. However, in a new study, that belief has been changed. While the support on gay marriage is slowly growing, my community overwhelmingly believes that no bill should limit the rights for the LGBT community.

Here's more:

African-Americans are by far the largest outlier of any of the 15 demographic groups (people were sorted according to age, race, religion and party affiliation) studied, according to Pew Research. Overall, African-Americans’ views resemble those of young adults and nonreligious Americans: 61 percent of black respondents favored laws requiring businesses to serve same-sex couples.

If you set aside responses from African-Americans, 83 percent of the variation in support for laws requiring businesses to serve same-sex couples just like straight couples is explained by support for same-sex marriage. Including African-Americans drops the variation explained to just 52 percent.

Why are African-Americans so much more in favor of anti-discrimination laws than same-sex marriage? That’s hard to say, but there are at least two opposing demographic forces at work.

On the one hand, the fact that African-Americans are more likely to be religious also makes them more likely to oppose same-sex marriage. On the other — as Claire Gecewicz and Michael Lipka of Pew Research point out — African-Americans (perhaps based on their own history of being discriminated against) are more likely than white people to say that gay Americans face discrimination.

In the case of businesses serving gay customers, opposition to discrimination was stronger than the pull of religion.

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