> But there is ample law and policy in place to protect the rights of minorities and LGBT.
The degree to which people believe this is striking. The reality is that these protections are very recent developments and are today easily reversed, particularly by an administration that cares less than usual about the details of how the federal government is run.
How many actual federal legal protections exist now? To me it seems like there hasn't been much change in federal law, some at state levels, but in general it's that people are more accepting because they think Cam on Modern Family is funny.
Quite a lot of rests on the courts. The Supreme Court has a set of case law related to minority rights, which it could reverse--as it did with the Voting Rights Act.
The national legalization of gay marriage happened via the Supreme Court just last year. There is no reason at all it could not be reversed under a new court.
A lot more rests in Department of Justice policy. Look at what Justice has been doing to investigate and clean up racial bias in municipal police forces recently. They have consent decrees with Seattle, Cleveland, and others to try to change the way they do policing.
A new administration could easily abandon every one of those agreements, and the goal of removing racial bias from policing generally. It might even be likely--senior people in the Trump campaign have praised racial profiling as an effective and useful police tactic.
So it sounds like things haven't really been progressing through legislation as much as through judicial and executive action and maybe those things aren't as permanent as hoped?
>The national legalization of gay marriage happened via the Supreme Court just last year. There is no reason at all it could not be reversed under a new court.
Yes, there is; it's "stare decisis". Even Dred Scott has not been reversed because of it.
The degree to which people believe this is striking. The reality is that these protections are very recent developments and are today easily reversed, particularly by an administration that cares less than usual about the details of how the federal government is run.