Tim Graham
Tim Graham is executive editor of NewsBusters and host of the NewsBusters Podcast. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the internet era.
The top story on the front of Friday’s USA Today was “Gen Z is driving LGBTQ identity.” Breaking news editor Susan Miller reported the latest Gallup survey found 7.2 per cent of US adults identify as LGBTQ, and younger generations – particularly those 25 and under – are driving the numbers.
For Generation Z – those born from 1997 to 2004 – 19.7 per cent identified as LGBTQ in the poll, which was based on aggregated data of 10,000 people.
Among millennials – those born from 1981 to 1996 – 11.2 per cent identified as LGBTQ.
By comparison, 3.3 per cent of Generation X identified as LGBTQ in 2022; for baby boomers, 2.7 per cent.
A strong majority of this number described themselves as bisexual – about two-thirds of those in the Generation Z category, 62 per cent of millennials, and 58 per cent overall.
Miller ended the story, as usual, with affirmation from a gay activist about everything the left has accomplished in their culture war.
Cathy Renna of the National LGBTQ Task Force says young people are blazing trails. “Who we are is rooted deeply in us and is something young people – growing up in a culture that has finally been able to tell them they aren’t alone, that they are beautiful and perfect exactly as they are – will never turn back from now.”
The media won’t see this as something that’s different from an innate identity, something that can ‘go viral’ and be promoted in schools and entertainment and social media. That might make it sound negative, and we know that there is no ‘other side’ of this debate – except ‘hate’.
Online, Miller of USA Today added another gay-activist point about conservatives “targeting” transgenders in legislation:
The poll comes at a challenging for the LGBTQ community. The Human Rights Campaign said last week that it is tracking 340 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in statehouses this year. About 150 of those would restrict the rights of transgender people, the most pieces of legislation targeting the trans community in a single year, the HRC says.
Conservatives can never be ‘pro-girls sports’ or ‘pro-parents rights’. They’re always ‘anti-gay’. They’re never in favour of ‘protections’ for girls or parents. They’re ‘targeting’ the vulnerable.
Earlier in the week, Miller wrote a more flagrantly promotional story on the long march of the LGBTQ Left fighting a “blitz of anti-LGBTQ bills”. It carried one solitary quote from Utah Gov Spencer Cox (R) in a defense of a new law forbidding sex-change surgery on minors, but was otherwise a press release for the National LGBTQ Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign.
