Global attitudes involving homosexuality are changing rapidly. Tolerance toward lesbian and gay relationships has increased in almost every continent. More often than not, younger people have been at the forefront of this change. In this article, we explore explanations for this cross-national phenomenon. Specifically, we test to see whether contextual factors, those that allow lesbian women and gay men to freely express themselves or to gain cultural representation in the media, have driven this transformation. The results show that inter-cohort effects, or more liberal attitudes among younger people, are related to the pervasiveness of a nation’s mass media and to the presence of press freedom. This research suggests a strong link between increasing mass support for minority rights and the factors that encourage and allow minorities to express their viewpoints to others. These findings have broad implications, in that they help us understand the growing global acceptance around gay rights.
In recent decades, Americans’ thinking regarding the causes of human behavior has changed considerably. In particular, there has been a swing toward attributing a variety of behaviors to biological factors, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident than for sexual orientation. In this paper, we draw on two overtime survey datasets to argue that new scientific evidence on the biological bases of homosexuality in the 1990s rapidly changed commonly held beliefs. However, because these scientific explanations were perceived to be relevant to gay rights, persuasion tended to be conditioned on citizens’ political values. In short, liberals were considerably more likely than conservatives to embrace biological attributions for homosexuality during this period. Furthermore, these changing—and diverging—causal beliefs about homosexuality appear to have contributed to both increasing support for, and left–right disagreements over, gay rights.
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