By Dave Dahl
A new encyclopedia is out – a guide to LGBTQ people in politics.
U of I Springfield political science professor Jason Pierceson says the two-volume LGBTQ Americans in the U.S. Political System: An Encyclopedia of Activists, Voters, Candidates, and Officeholders is a reference work that can also be used in schools.
And Pierceson says despite advances, the LGBTQ community is still not fully accepted. “There’s still a huge political and legal debate over marriage equality and who has to pay attention to it, who has to adhere to legal same-sex marriages, who can ignore those, who can get around those, and in some ways this is an attempt to undo same-sex marriage by invoking religious freedom, religious liberty. It’s actually a tactic being used to undermine the very notion of same-sex marriage itself, I would argue.”
Pierceson is the author of several works examining LGBTQ people’s role in society.
He says, to some, it’s still not settled whether sexual orientation and gender identity are covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“The Trump administration has been quite hostile to trans rights,” Pierceson says. Examples are “the transgender military ban, there are still a lot of states that don’t have antidiscrimination laws about sexual orientation or gender identity, there’s not a federal law for that. And, even though marriage equality is legal, a lot of folks can get married one day and being fired from a job for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender the next day.”
The encyclopedia, which, Pierceson mentions, is available on Amazon, covers ground from murdered San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk to 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.
