One of the million outrages that the left is outraged about this very second is that the census form will not ask about sexual orientation.
The Trump administration canceled plans to probe Americans for their sexual orientation in the 2020 Census, nixing efforts by congressional Democrats who’d wanted a better picture of the country’s increasingly complex family and sexual dynamics.
Gay-rights advocates had been pressing for the questions, saying it was time the country got an official count.
They appeared to have won a victory Tuesday morning, when the Census Bureau released its list of proposed subjects for 2020, and said “sexual orientation and gender identity” were new additions. But hours later the Census released an updated list striking the sexual orientation proposal.
A spokesman for the bureau said they had been asked by members of Congress to include the questions, and had been studying it — but determined there was no “federal need” for that information to be collected.
“The Subjects Planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey report released today inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic in the appendix. This topic is not being proposed to Congress for the 2020 Census or American Community Survey,” the bureau said in a statement.
Instead the 2020 census will return to the same age, race, occupation, marital status and other areas of inquiry that have been used for years.
Most of those are also on the debatable side. Certainly it's unclear why the government needs racial statistics. But asking about sexual orientation is even more dubious. If there was any intervention by Team Trump, which is quite unproven, it did a favor to gay rights advocates. The public perceptions of the prevalence of gay and transgender identification in the general population and the actual presence backed by statistics are widely apart. If anything such a census would have harmed their cause.