A sea change in attitudes towards and the legal status of LGBT+ people took place in the U.S. between approximately 1970 and 2020. In 1973, the General Social Survey found only 11 percent of their respondents believed that sexual relations between members of the same sex were “not wrong at all” but in 2024 found that number had reached 55 percent.1 In 1996, Gallup found only 27 percent of poll respondents thought “marriages between homosexuals should be recognized by the law as valid,” but support for legal recognition of same-sex marriages reached majority opinion status in 2011 and in 2024 stood at 69 percent (Gallup 2024).2 Few other cultural changes on similarly politically charged issues have occurred at such a rapid pace.

The legal rights of LGBT+ people changed at an arguably even more incredible pace. Before 1962, many states had sodomy laws effectively criminalizing male same-sex sexual activity. In 1986, the constitutionality of such laws under the Equal Protection Clause was upheld by the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick. In 1993, the Clinton administration introduced the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to the U.S. military as a means of enabling people of all sexual orientations to serve in the military (so long as their sexual orientation was neither known nor inferable from credible information about them). In 1996, the U.S. passed the Defense of Marriage Act, defining “marriage” as a union between one man and one woman for all federal legal purposes. In many states, much same-sex sexual activity was illegal until the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas declared sodomy laws in 14 states unconstitutional in 2003.

Astoundingly, in 2015, less than two decades after a Democratic president had signed a law forbidding the federal government from recognizing them, the right to marry a person of the same sex became a Constitutionally protected element of U.S. law. For comparison, it was Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 that ruled racial segregation laws were constitutional, and it took until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for the U.S. federal government to legally forbid racial discrimination in the right to vote. The gap between positive legal affirmation of (what was later deemed) unequal protection under the law and the end of that legal regime was on the order of seven decades in the case of minority members’ rights,3 approximately 50 years longer than the parallel moments in the LGBT+ rights movement.

How was a marginalized group of Americans able to go from widely reviled and legally discriminated against to their current status with legal protections and a significant degree of cultural cachet in such a relatively short period of time? Clearly, a significant amount of the change took place because it built on rights and legal precedents established by the Civil Rights Movement for the legal protection and equality of ethnic minority members. However, the LGBT+ movement faced a different set of challenges, including being much smaller in number and being more or less randomly distributed across the population. This is in contrast to being born into a social group assigned an ethnic identity along the ancestry lines that are (generally) readily detectable by personal appearance. How was this movement able to effect such change so rapidly? Surely the answer involves too many factors to name, but more narrowly one can ask what features of the U.S. political order they could use to advance their ends. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, it merits considering what features of liberal democracy in the United States were conducive to LGBT+ freedom, what features were not, and what the future of LGBT+ rights activism might look like.

This paper will examine several features of liberal democracy in the U.S. that were important in either helping or hindering the movement for LGBT+ rights and acceptance. A general pattern is apparent that majoritarian features were not as important as features that allowed for contestation, discussion, and the assertion of minority rights over and against majorities. An integral component of the movement was shifting public opinion and demanding to receive the same treatment as cisgender, heterosexual citizens when formal legal institutions did not do so. In this sense, the important elements of democracy in the U.S. for promoting LGBT+ rights have not been majoritarian democracy but rather “government by discussion” and the rule of law. This insight can provide some help in predicting and making recommendations about the future and advancement of LGBT+ rights in the U.S.

This paper proceeds as follows. Section II describes the elements of liberal democracy in the U.S., their role in hindering or promoting LGBT+ freedom, and the lesson that arises as a pattern. Section III applies this lesson and others from the history of LGBT+ rights in the U.S. to today’s foremost cause in LGBT+ freedom: the rights of transgender individuals. Lastly, Section IV concludes with reflections on why, beyond their substantive worthiness, LGBT+ rights are both a sign of the health of liberal institutions and, likely, a cause for optimism about the future of freedom in the U.S.

KEYWORDS: Democracy, LGBT, Liberalism