A federal bill announced Tuesday seeks
to include LGBT questions on major surveys conducted by the
government.
The Census Equality Act was introduced
by Democratic Senators Kamala Harris of California and Tom Carper of
Delaware.
Their bill seeks to add questions
allowing Americans to identify their sexual orientation and gender
identity on the U.S. Census, which takes place once every 10 years,
and the annual American Community Survey.
The Trump administration last year said
that neither survey would include such questions.
In a statement, Harris said that the
legislation is needed because “the spirit of the Census is that no
one should go uncounted and no one should be invisible.”
She asserted that the information could
provide “better tools to enforce civil rights protections for a
community that is too often discriminated against.”
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the
National LGBTQ Task Force have endorsed the bill.