Debate Moderators: It’s Time to Ask Democratic Candidates About LGBT Rights

At last week’s Democratic town hall in Iowa, Duke University student Brian Carlson asked then candidate Martin O’Malley, “What will you do to assure full federal LGBT equality?”

This was noteworthy because in the three Democratic debates that have been held so far, not one moderator has asked a single question about LGBT rights.

Millennials — whom candidates are trying so desperately to woo — are disenchanted with politics. Only 26 percent say they care about politics as a top-three topic to discuss, according to the Pew Research Center. Despite millennials having Democratic leanings, candidates can’t rely on them to show up to the voting booth.

What do millennials care about? Among many other things, they care about LGBT rights. Before the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality last year, another Pew study showed some three-quarters of millennials were in favor of same-sex marriage (including 61 percent of young Republicans).

So why haven’t the networks found it pertinent to discuss LGBT issues at the debates? Many people seem to think the fight for LGBT rights ended last June, with marriage equality – that there’s little for the candidates to discuss now that same-sex couples are legally able to marry. And even if there are legal battles left to fight, the thinking goes, the Democratic candidates would all go to bat for them – right?

The reality is that marriage equality didn’t put an end to LGBT discrimination; we have much further to go.

The next wave of legislation against LGBT individuals has already been drafted and, in some places, passed. Last November marked a tremendous loss for the community with the repeal of HERO, a human rights ordinance that protected 16 different classes, in Houston.

And just in the past few weeks, the Indiana Senate advanced a broad Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) — an increasingly popular type of legislation that has in recent years been used to discriminate against LGBT individuals in the name of defendants’ “sincerely held” religious beliefs. LGBT advocates are calling Indiana’s bill a “super RFRA”; it goes even further than the legislation that caused the state to lose an estimated $60 million last spring.