[Note: the following post comes to us from Caitlin Breedlove, co-director of Southerners on New Ground].

By Caitlin Breedlove, SONG Co-Director

As an LGBTQ person, I think what is happening at the North Carolina legislature affects our community deeply. I want LGBTQ people to be involved in fighting back against this repressive legislation because I think it is the right thing to do, but also because it deeply affects us. In the past few months, we have seen terrible changes in North Carolina– the cutting of Medicaid for half a million North Carolinians who are poor and working poor. Attacks against voting rights, our schools, healthcare rights for poor people, and the demonizing of immigrants. These are LGBTQ issues. They impact LGBTQ people deeply. Here is how*:

Poverty: Children raised in Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual families are twice as likely to grow up in poverty as kids raised in heterosexual households. Rural and African-American LGB people are even more likely to live in poverty, and lesbians are consistently more likely to be living in poverty than heterosexual women

Immigration: It seems simple, but thousands of immigrants are also LGBTQ people.

Medicaid: For the first time, low-income LGBT Americans have access to Medicaid. Failing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, deprives hundreds of thousands of low-income North Carolinians, including low-income LGBT North Carolinians, from access to health care.

Voting Rights: Read More…