In today's day and age, everyone is talking about sexual orientation and what it means to be homosexual and transgendered. What people have been looking at, though, are just their rights to be married and adopt children. There is something else that the people of the LGBT community have to deal with: discrimination in the workplace. While doing some research, I found that discrimination that ensues in the workplace on the basis of a person's sexual orientation, though the numbers are small, is almost equivalent to the gendered discrimination against women, which is a whole problem in itself. This phenomena creates an issue in which homosexual and transgendered individuals earn ten percent less, or sometimes even more depending on the case, as opposed to their heterosexual coworkers (Croteau, 1996). Looking at it from an outside point of view, due to these facts, I feel that sexual orientation-based discrimination is becoming a significant problem in the United States.
A lot of this discrimination stems from a bias that has tarnished homosexual and transgendered people for years: religion. Due to religion, there are many people that feel that any sexual orientation besides the one of that of heterosexuality is wrong and therefore, that is what American democracy was based off of for a long time. Religion has always been a part of the way that the people in America react and feel about important topics, and it is definitely a defining aspect of how many people (especially democratic leaders and business owners) feel about their views on sexual-orientation. The main culprits that have declared a personal war against those of the LGBT community are the Catholic and Mormon churches who think that homosexuality is a sin and they are the ones who want to deny them of equal rights in the United States. The most popular example of this is the hostility that has ensued over Proposition 8 in the state of California (Wilcox & Iida, 2011 p181-183).