An eight-mile trip into the countryside ended at an old barn which had been converted into a restaurant. “The food’s good here,” one of the travelers said as we set out after the Sunday service on winding rural and sometimes gravel roads.
The former feed store set in cornfields was everything Cracker Barrel would hope to be, and just what we expected. What we didn’t expect was the poster taped to the door announcing the crossroads’ first “Drag Show” with three headshots of the lead performers.
“If the Drag Show has reached this place, then times really have changed,” someone in our little church group mumbled. “I guess there’s no going back,” I thought to myself, just a half-hour after preaching on the decline of our public morality in Illinois with the recent actions of the state legislature as my chief examples: legalized marijuana, expanded gambling, and abortion with virtually no limits. And did I mention the gay-pride flag flying for the first time over the state Capitol?
But maybe I was wrong.
A new Harris Poll commissioned by the gay activist group GLAAD shows the LGBT movement is losing ground among Millennials.
That was a surprise, even to the pollsters, who called the flagging support “alarming” and said it signals “a looming social crisis in discrimination.”
The survey shows that among 18- to 34-year-olds, LGBT acceptance dropped from 63% in 2016 to 45% in 2018. As Baptist Press reported, the biggest drop from the previous year happened among young women, from 64% in 2017 to 52% in 2018. “But across all three years, the decline was especially noticeable among young males, dropping from 62% in 2016…(to) 35% in 2018.
Young people also registered a rise in discomfort in several specific scenarios: 39% said they would be “very” or “somewhat” uncomfortable learning that their child had been taught a lesson on LGBT history in school, compared with 27% in 2016. And 33% were uncomfortable with their child having an LGBT teacher, up from 25%.
While LGBT acceptance is almost steady among adults age 35 and older, declining support among Millennials may be like the “fist-sized cloud” on the horizon Elijah pointed out, the signal of change to come that, in the current climate, no one imagined possible.