By David Mendoza - Tuesday, April 28, 2015

The Supreme Court heard arguments today in the case that could legalize same-sex marriage across the nation. Currently, same-sex couples can marry in 36 states. That’s more than twice as many states that permitted such unions only two years ago.

Yet even as the United States advances toward full marriage equality, several forms of discrimination against LGBT Americans remain legal. Recent controversies in Indiana and Arkansas focused America’s attention on Religious Freedom Restoration Acts. Opponents of these laws like Lambda Legal correctly argued that it would provide a new defense for people who want to treat LGBT residents unfairly. However, even without such laws, people and businesses could already discriminate against someone because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity since these states and many others lack inclusive civil rights laws.

Using data from the Human Rights Campaign and recent news reports, the chart below reveals how inadequate laws protecting LGBT Americans are.

Click here to embiggen this image.

For the last decade, same-sex marriage has dominated the conversation about LGBT rights. Sometimes so much so that it can seem that LGBT Americans have made more progress than they actually have. Law professors David S. Cohen and Leonore Carpenter made this point in a recent op-ed in USA Today. As they wrote,

Because we as a country have come so far in acceptance of LGBT individuals and seem to be on the precipice of a Supreme Court ruling requiring marriage equality, we like to think there also must be protections against discrimination in the law. However, nothing could be further from the truth. This is truly a gaping hole in American law.

One glance of the previous chart confirms what Cohen and Carpenter suggest.

In particular, anti-discrimination laws in the South are extremely porous. With the exception of Delaware and Maryland — which I included as part of the South because I used regions devised by the Census Bureau — the rest of the South lacks even the most basic bans against firing a person or refusing to serve them because they’re gay. In contrast, every state in the Northeast allows same-sex marriage and provides the most comprehensive, though not complete, protection against anti-LGBT discrimination.

A note on the design

Other publications have displayed the same data I used in this post. The example below by the Indianapolis Star is a typical variation that shows the data in a map. But is a map really the best choice? Kaiser Fung of Junk Charts asks this same question about a series of maps made by the New York Times. I think the answer in both cases is no. I tend to agree with a commenter on Fung’s post who recommends using the chart form I ended up choosing.

Map by Michael Campbell and Kristine Guerra of the IndyStar.

The primary advantage of my design is that it allows viewers to compare different categories faster than they can with a map. Viewers can determine which types of discrimination are disallowed in a state by looking down a column and compare differences between states by scanning rows horizontally. Such comparisons are substantially harder to do with the map produced by the IndyStar. Additionally, the map distorts the prominence of states in the Midwest with small populations and large land areas compared to states in the Northeast with larger populations but smaller land areas. My chart also includes more specific categories than one map can contain. The conspicuous disparity between the comprehensiveness of California and Nevada’s anti-discrimination laws is less apparent in the map than it is in the chart.

One advantage a map might have over a chart is that you can more readily see regional patterns. However, I think that by dividing the chart into four regions you can get a similar effect.

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