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Here’s Where Your State Stands on LGBT Rights

Mother Jones

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In a time of uncertainty and anxiety for LGBT rights advocates, and with plenty of battles left to fight, 2016 showed some encouraging signs for broader protections at the state level, according to a new analysis by the country’s biggest LGBT advocacy group.

Over the past year, state legislatures saw an uptick in bills affecting the LGBT community—with a whopping 753 such bills introduced. Some of the most famous, like North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” sought to restrict their rights. But many more bills—two-thirds of them, in fact—pushed to improve protections for the LGBT community, the Human Rights Campaign found in a report published Wednesday. “There has definitely been some good to come out of the last 12 months,” says Lynne Bowman, a field director for the advocacy group, which put out the report in collaboration with Equality Federation Institute.

Sixteen nondiscrimination laws passed this year, including in Massachusetts, which enhanced its law in July to give trans people the right to use public bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity. Governors in Montana, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania signed executive orders expanding protections for gay and trans state employees (though a Louisiana judge struck down the governor’s protection this week.)

Courtesy of the Human Rights Campaign

Hate crime laws were also expanded in a dozen states to include crimes targeting people for their sexual orientation or gender identity. (Check out how your state stacks up, in the map above.) The number of hate crime laws proposed more than doubled from 2015, with attacks on the LGBT community gaining national attention in the wake of the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Florida that left 50 people dead this summer.

In five states—Hawaii, Delaware, Maryland, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—lawmakers pushed through legislation to stop health care insurers from excluding trans patients. Meanwhile, half a dozen states passed bills relating to youth suicide prevention and anti-bullying in schools, and Vermont and New York joined the list of states banning conversion therapy.

But it wasn’t all good news for LGBT rights. State legislators proposed more than 250 anti-LGBT bills this year, more than in any other year since 2009. The most high-profile setback was North Carolina’s House Bill 2, which removed anti-discrimination protections for LGBT workers and required trans people to use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex, not their gender identity. Gov. Pat McCrory and North Carolina’s legislators met immediate pushback, losing an estimated $395 million in business in the state and sparking a Justice Department lawsuit. Even so, 14 other states proposed their own bathroom bills this year—though none of them passed. Of the 252 total bills seeking to restrict LGBT rights, only 8 passed. It “took a lot of collective work” to make sure this restrictive legislation didn’t go through, HRC’s Bowman said.

Courtesy of the Human Rights Campaign

And there’s still a lot of work to do. Eight states don’t allow teachers to discuss LGBT topics in schools, while 19 states exclude transgender people from state Medicaid. More than half of all states still don’t have nondiscrimination laws protecting gay or gender-nonconforming people in employment, housing, public accommodation, or education. (See more in the map below.)

Courtesy of the Human Rights Campaign

Even with so many anti-LGBT bills shot down this year, Bowman said we should expect more to crop up in 2017, particularly “religious freedom” bills and additional laws that discriminate against transgender people. Of course, this is all just at the state level. Donald Trump’s administration, along with a prospective Cabinet of LGBT rights opponents, could pose a whole new set of hurdles in the years to come.

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Here’s Where Your State Stands on LGBT Rights

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No, Trump’s election hasn’t derailed the U.N. climate conference

In the days leading up to Election Day, climate negotiators preparing for the U.N. climate conference in Marrakech, Morocco — aka COP22 — sidestepped questions about Donald Trump with cautious smiles. Now, participants are doing their best to sidestep global panic.

Still, among post-election feelings of fear, outrage, and physical danger lies a commitment to keep the current climate talks on track. In fact, there’s even cautious optimism.

“Everybody recognizes that there may be a challenge lying ahead,” says David Waskow, who’s in Morocco as director of the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) international climate initiative. “There’s planning going on, thinking through what are the next steps and how responses might be built. But in the negotiating room, everything we’ve heard, the tone has continued to be a positive one.”

Though President-elect Donald Trump has called the historic Paris Agreement “one more bad trade deal” and promised he would “cancel” it, negotiators are plowing on with or without him. If Trump were to reject the Paris Agreement on his first day in office, it would still take four years for the United States to fully extricate itself: the three years the government must wait before exiting the agreement and a one-year withdrawal period. Trump’s transition team is currently looking for a legal work-around that could see the U.S. gone from the agreement in a year.

“It’s not a matter of simply saying, ‘Sorry, see you later,’” says Waskow.

The agreement was built for some resilience. “The Paris Agreement was designed to be durable and survive shifts in political currents. There are plenty of signs that its goals are being internalized in the economy,” says Elliot Diringer, executive vice president at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES). “Countries are acting because they feel the impacts of climate change and see the economic opportunities in a clean-energy transition. None of that’s changed.”

The United States’ domestic drivers of change may also hearten the international community. Negotiators point to the cities, states, and businesses pushing a transition to renewable energy and integrating climate action into policies and plans. According to WRI CEO and president Andrew Steer, there’s “a huge amount at the subnational and corporate level” spurring progress. Alden Meyer, at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the election won’t stall that movement. “The drive to de-carbonize the U.S. economy will continue regardless of what a President Trump does,” he said.

Waskow agrees. “That will be an important factor,” he says, “the context in which a new administration finds itself.”

Still, feelings of disappointment are palpable among conference attendees and the environmental community. “We cannot pretend that [the] election outcome was anything less than deeply disturbing,” said Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund.

But that doesn’t mean all momentum is lost. Amidst the uncertainty, a renewed dedication from other countries has emerged. Celia Gautier with Climate Action Network (CAN) France points to how the European Union stepped in to the leadership vacuum left when the United States exited the Kyoto Protocol. “Regardless of how Donald Trump decides to act on climate, all countries — including the E.U. — have to step up,” she says. “The political landscape in the U.S. may have changed, but the reality of climate change hasn’t.”

Other parties at Marrakech remain hopeful that even if Trump intends to drag down global progress, he’ll be overpowered. “With the momentum we’ve seen this year, there’s no question that no one government, no one head of state — no matter how powerful — can stall the transformation unfolding before our eyes,” said Catherine Abreu, executive director of CAN Canada.

And according to Waskow of WRI, U.S. state department negotiators, led by Jonathan Pershing, are keeping their heads down in Marrakech. During the conference, the U.S. contingent will work to make good on the Obama administration’s climate commitments with the time they have left.

“The path forward has never been a straight line,” says Diringer of C2ES. Nov. 8 may have made the road through Paris more treacherous, but the international community insists it will stay the course.

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No, Trump’s election hasn’t derailed the U.N. climate conference

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