Government can feel like something far away. Like something that happens in buildings we rarely enter, decided by people we’ve never met, while we’re busy working, raising kids, going to school, or just getting through the week.
For queer people, though, government isn’t distant at all. It’s deeply personal.
The government decides whether you can marry the person you love. Whether you can be fired for who you are. Whether you can walk into a business and be served like anyone else. Whether your kid is safe from discrimination at school. Whether your ID reflects who you actually are. Whether you have any recourse when someone discriminates against you. Whether your community gets the resources it needs.
Once policy reaches into those spaces, politics stops being abstract. It becomes something that shapes the very fabric of your life; your existence.
And when the deck feels stacked against us, disengaging can feel like the only reasonable response. It’s exhausting watching the same fights play out again and again, seeing your existence treated as a talking point. Frustration, even hopelessness, makes sense.
But stepping away from the political process is a lot like folding before you’ve even seen your hand.
Voting can’t guarantee the outcome you want. It doesn’t mean that who you vote for will always act the way you hope. And it’s not the only way to create change. But what it does is give you a say in who gets to write, enforce, interpret, administer, and sometimes repeal, the policies that shape your life.
Your voice matters. It’s even louder when it joins others.
LGBTQ+ Rights Were Built Through Civic Participation
The history of LGBTQ+ rights in America is, in large part, a history of civic participation.
Our rights didn’t appear overnight. They were built over decades by people organizing, protesting, educating, voting, running for office, calling their representatives, filing lawsuits, serving on boards and commissions, and insisting, over and over and over, that queer people deserved the same dignity as everyone else.
Sometimes change came through legislation. Sometimes through executive or administrative action. Sometimes through the courts. Often it took all three, working together.
Take the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for example. For years, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a federal policy that created a compromise to allow queer people to serve, barred queer service members from serving openly and became a tool used to end the honorable service of thousands of LGBTQ+ service members. Ending it took an act of Congress, a presidential signature, and years of advocacy from people who challenged the policy from inside and outside the military. Congress passed the repeal in late 2010, and the President signed it into law on December 22. It didn’t actually take effect until September 20, 2011, once the Pentagon finished implementing it. The repeal even passed with bipartisan support.
None of that happened because one person decided the government should be more accepting. It happened because people organized, advocated, voted, and pushed a bill through Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon.
Marriage equality has a similar story. The Supreme Court’s rulings in United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges reshaped the constitutional landscape. But the story didn’t end at the courthouse steps. In 2022, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act; repealing the federal statute that had defined marriage in opposite-sex-only terms and guaranteeing federal recognition of marriages valid under state law, including protection for couples whose marriage might otherwise go unrecognized if they moved across state lines.
That, too, was democracy in action.
These are just two examples among many. Time and again, LGBTQ+ rights have been shaped by the democratic process. It’s a process that can be slow, frustrating, and full of setbacks, but one that can also produce extraordinary change. If we stay engaged. If we participate.
Our Rights Can Be Protected or They Can Be Taken Away
There’s a second lesson in our history that matters just as much as the first.
Progress is possible. But it isn’t permanent.
Civil rights protections don’t sustain themselves. Laws can be amended or repealed. Regulations shift. Agencies change how they enforce existing rules. Courts reinterpret statutes and constitutional protections. Funding priorities change. Local governments add protections or roll them back.
That doesn’t mean every right is equally fragile, or that every political shift leads to an immediate loss of rights. But it does mean we can’t assume that winning a protection means the fight is over. Our rights last only as long as we keep showing up for them.
For a community that has spent decades fighting for recognition, that’s a hard lesson. But it’s an important one. Marriage equality was once illegal across most of the country. Service members could be discharged simply for being gay or lesbian. In plenty of places, queer people could be fired, evicted, or turned away with little or no legal protection at all.
Those conditions changed because people kept participating in the institutions capable of changing them. And that same machinery can run in reverse, as we’ve seen with trans rights, which is exactly why elections matter, even when the stakes aren’t obvious in the moment.
An election rarely decides whether one specific law changes tomorrow. Instead, it decides what is prioritized, who gets to introduce legislation, vote on it, appoint officials, run agencies, set enforcement priorities, and shape what happens next. That makes political disengagement a real risk for queer people. Stepping back from the process means giving up one of the few tools we have to influence it.
Pennsylvania: Where Protection Depends on Where You Live
Here in Lancaster County, this plays out in a very concrete way.
The City of Lancaster has a Human Relations ordinance that bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, among other protected categories in employment, housing, commercial property, education, public accommodations, lending, and real estate. The Lancaster City Human Relations Commission enforces it. Step outside the city limits, though, and that protection disappears. The rest of the county no longer has a Human Relations Commission. They do not have the same LGBTQ+ protections as the city at its heart. Lancaster isn’t unusual; municipalities across Pennsylvania have adopted their own nondiscrimination ordinances, each with its own limited reach creating invisible borders of protection. This patchwork of protection and risk means your rights change dramatically based on where you are at any given moment.
Statewide, the picture is just as complicated. In 2023, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission adopted regulations clarifying that “sex,” a category already protected under the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act, includes gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation. Those regulations went through the state’s regulatory process and took effect that same year.
But it’s worth understanding the difference between a regulation like that one and a statute. A statute is a law passed by the legislature and signed, or otherwise enacted, according to the state constitution. A regulation is a rule an agency adopts under authority the legislature already gave it. Regulations matter; they can clarify how a law is interpreted and change real outcomes for real people. But they’re not the same as the legislature writing those protections directly into statute.
So, Pennsylvania’s protections right now are layered; legislation, regulation, court interpretation, and local ordinance, stacked on top of one another. What protection you actually have can depend on your city council, the state legislature, a regulatory agency, a school board, a court, your county, or the federal government. Usually more than one of them at once. And they can change anytime the balance power in Harrisburg shifts.
Your Local Election Affects Your Daily Life
We tend to talk about politics happening in Washington or Harrisburg more than we do in the municipalities we live in. In reality, the government that has the most immediate impact on our lives is our local one.
Local government shapes everything from zoning to human relations to public services. School boards set policy for students. Judges rule within their courts. State legislators write state law. All of them influencing nondiscrimination ordinances, public accommodations, housing, schools, libraries, public safety, behavioral health and social services, municipal funding, LGBTQ+ community programs, board and commission appointments, and enforcement priorities.
For a queer person, local government isn’t the minor leagues. It’s the school district your kids attend. It’s the city or township where you rent or own a home. It’s the county where you go for services. It governs the public spaces, programs, and everyday policies you actually run into.
A presidential race gets more media coverage than a city council race. That doesn’t mean it matters more to your day-to-day life. Often, the people making decisions closest to home have the most immediate effect on your community, which matters a lot when some of the protections you rely on exist only at the local level. A city can prohibit discrimination that state law doesn’t reach. A school board can adopt policies to protect students. A county can decide whether to fund the programs that support its most vulnerable residents.
Midterms Matter Just as Much as Presidential Elections
Midterm elections get less attention than they deserve as well. Even the name makes them sound less important; like something that happens in between the elections that “really” count.
They’re not. They’re one of the ways our system of checks and balances actually works.
Electing a president isn’t meant to hand that person unchecked authority. The system was built to distribute power. Congress writes and passes laws, the executive branch enforces them, courts decide whether government action holds up against the Constitution, and state and local governments carry their own separate authority. These pieces are designed to push against each other. To prevent one becoming supreme over all others.
Midterms are part of that design. They let voters weigh in on the direction of government while a presidential term is still underway, and depending on which offices are on the ballot, they can shift the balance of power in Congress, state legislatures, and local government, which shapes what legislation moves forward, what gets prioritized, and how the executive branch gets overseen. In short, the midterm elections offer us an opportunity to enact a course correction.
That matters because decisions made under an administration don’t stay contained to that administration. Laws pass. Regulations get written. Budgets get set. Judges get appointed. Agencies set their priorities. Programs get built, expanded, cut, or eliminated. A midterm doesn’t undo any of that, and it doesn’t guarantee a shift in power will produce a particular result, but it gives voters another shot at influencing where things go and another way to hold officials accountable.
That’s why midterms shouldn’t be treated as unimportant. They’re part of the system itself. And because midterm turnout tends to be lower than presidential turnout, showing up matters even more. Lower turnout means a smaller slice of eligible voters is making the call. Showing up means you’re part of that decision instead of leaving it whoever is more motivated to turn out.
Our democracy doesn’t just give you one chance every four years to weigh in. It gives you repeated chances to participate, evaluate, hold people accountable, and shape what comes next. For queer people whose rights and protections can shift from one administration to the next, that matters immensely. Midterms let us respond to those shifts as they’re happening, instead of waiting until a presidential term ends and hoping for the best.
Voting Isn’t the Only Form of Civic Participation
Voting is one tool in a much bigger toolbox. Democracy runs on what happens between elections, too.
That can mean registering to vote or helping someone else figure out how, learning about candidates and policy, showing up to a city council or school board meeting, calling an elected official about something you care about, submitting public comment or testifying at a hearing. It can also mean joining a community group, volunteering, serving on a board, or just helping a neighbor understand how local government actually works.
Queer communities have always leaned hard on organizing, often because the institutions around us didn’t understand us, didn’t recognize us, or actively worked against us. That work hasn’t stopped. Voting decides who holds office. Advocacy shapes what those officials hear. Organizing builds the support that makes change possible. Community service strengthens the people and institutions around us. Each one makes the others stronger.
Voting as an Act of Queer Self-Determination
For queer people there’s something deeper in voting.
We’ve spent decades insisting that we belong. Not as an exception, not only when it’s convenient for someone else, but as full members of our families, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities. We’ve fought to have our relationships recognized, our families respected, our identities acknowledged, our lives protected. We’ve pushed back against laws and institutions that treated us as less deserving.
Voting is one more way of asserting that truth. It’s a way of saying our families matter, our communities matter, and that the decisions government makes about LGBTQ+ issues aren’t just about talking points and motivating ‘the base.’ They affect real people; vulnerable people. It’s a reminder to ourselves and to the institutions meant to represent us, that we’re not a topic to be debated from a distance. We’re neighbors, coworkers, students, parents, caregivers, business owners, and friends.
That’s especially worth remembering when the political climate feels hostile. It’s easy to look at an election and think your voice is too small to matter, especially when your identity keeps getting turned into a talking point. But giving up your voice doesn’t make those conversations go away. It just makes it easier for decisions about your life to get made without you in the room.
Voting won’t get you everything you want. It’s not a replacement for organizing, advocacy, or community care. But it’s a tool. One that lets you help choose the people who make decisions on your behalf. Paired with organizing, advocacy, and community-building, it’s how we move from reacting to what happens to us, toward shaping what happens next.
Our Rights Are No Less Important
“LGBTQ+ rights are human rights” is a phrase we hear often, and it’s a powerful reminder that everyone deserves dignity, freedom, safety, and equal treatment; queer people included.
And yet, historically, our rights have too often been treated as separate from everyone else’s; as though protecting queer people were a favor rather than a basic obligation of society. Our relationships have been debated. Our families have been questioned. Our identities have been legislated. Our access to schools, jobs, housing, healthcare, and public life has been made conditional in ways most straight, cisgender people never have to think about.
Our rights aren’t less valid because we’re queer. They aren’t less important because we’re a minority. And we’re not less deserving of protection because someone decided our existence is controversial.
That’s why civic participation matters. Decisions about queer people’s lives don’t happen in a vacuum. They affect whether we can live with dignity and participate fully in our communities. The question was never whether queer people deserve some special category of rights. It’s whether the rights and protections that let anyone live safely, build a family, work, learn, worship, and move through the world freely will actually be applied to everyone.
As a result of widespread civic participation, discriminatory laws have been repealed, protections have been written into law, courts have recognized constitutional rights, local communities have adopted nondiscrimination ordinances, and various agencies have clarified how existing protections apply to queer people. None of that happened on its own. Queer people across decades have worked for it, fought for it, and in some cases bled for it.
That work isn’t finished, and it probably never fully will be. Every generation inherits what the last one built, and every generation has to help maintain it. Sometimes by pushing for new protections, sometimes by defending the ones that already exist, sometimes just by making sure a law already on the books actually gets enforced. And sometimes it means refusing to get so discouraged that we stop showing up.
Our rights shouldn’t have to be defended over and over simply because we’re queer. But until equality is so deeply built into our institutions that it stops being up for debate, we have to stay engaged.
We need to vote. To organize. To advocate. To educate. We have to show up at meetings, in conversations with elected officials, alongside our neighbors. We need to help other people understand how government actually touches their lives.
A Note About Nonpartisan Civic Engagement
As a 501(c)(3) organization, federal law prohibits us from participating or intervening in political campaigns for or against any candidate. At the same time, the IRS allows 501(c)(3)s to conduct nonpartisan voter education, voter registration, and get-out-the-vote work, and that’s exactly the space we are operating in.
Nonpartisan doesn’t mean we can’t talk about issues. We can talk about LGBTQ+ rights. We can talk about discrimination. We can talk about the history of civil rights protections and how laws and regulations affect queer people. We can help our community understand how government works and why participating in it matters.
What we can’t do is endorse or oppose a candidate or political party or run voter education efforts that favor one side over another.
