The above chart (click to enlarge) shows why HRC selected the 11 states it will visit on the bus tour.
The Human Rights Campaign on Monday announced a bus tour later this year to 11 states in the South and Midwest that lack both employment protections and relationship recognition for LGBT people. The tour, “On the Road to Equality,” will visit Texas from Sept. 9-11, stopping in Austin and College Station but not North Texas. In announcing the bus tour, HRC released new poll results showing that while Americans widely back LGBT equality, support lags in the South and Midwest. For example, 51 percent of Americans support marriage equality, compared to 43 percent in the South and Midwest; 71 percent of Americans support domestic partnerships, compared to 61 percent in the South; and 79 percent of Americans support LGBT employment protections, compared to 73 percent in the South. HRC spokesman Michael Cole-Schwartz said the poll’s sample size wasn’t large enough to yield reliable results for individual states. (A poll commissioned by Equality Texas last year put support for marriage equality at 43 percent and civil unions at 63 percent.) HRC’s full press release, as well as links to the poll results, can be found here.
I do hope they’re going to expand the tour to states like NY, MA, Delaware and New Hampshire – all places where transgender people have no nondiscrimination or hate crimes protections. But – where HRC supported pushing gay only nondiscrim laws – and then pushed for marriage or civil union laws while working to suppress efforts on those missing trans protections.