A significant majority of Americans would support gay and lesbian professional athletes openly playing on their favorite teams, a recent survey indicates. According to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), as reported on The Huffington Post:
“Seventy-three percent of Americans say they would fully support a professional sports team that signed a gay or lesbian athlete, according to a new survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit research organization. Only 19 percent of those surveyed said they would oppose such a decision.”
What’s more, the study shows that support is spread fairly evenly across the two major political parties and most religious affiliations in the United States:
“Seventy-nine percent of Democrats, 75 percent of independents and 66 percent of Republicans said they would support a team that signed a gay athlete.
“High levels of support also exist among all major religious groups, PRRI’s survey found. That includes Catholics (78 percent support), white mainline Protestants (77 percent), minority Protestants (66 percent), white evangelical Protestants (54 percent) and the religiously unaffiliated (84 percent). PRRI did not survey enough adherents of any other religion to create a statistically significant sample size.”
A spokesperson for PRRI also told the Huffington Post that, although support for LGBT athletes has risen over the last decade, most Americans are aware that gay and lesbian athletes continue to face discrimination within the country and around the world.
The very good news, however, from this survey suggests that the fans have got gay and lesbian athletes’ backs and are ready and willing to root for their favorite teams regardless of the player’s sexual orientations.
