Fighting to prevent an anti-LGBTQ backslide

When Naomi Goldberg began working for the Movement Advancement Project, same-sex couples were unable to legally marry in more than half of states — including her home state of California — and LGBTQ Americans were barred from serving openly in the military.

Now the nonprofit think tank’s executive director, Goldberg is fighting to protect LGBTQ rights secured over the last decade and prevent the nation from backsliding as anti-LGBTQ policies gain ground in state legislatures. 

Goldberg, a self-described “policy wonk,” began her career as a fellow at the Williams Institute, where she spent two years researching the economic impact of policies affecting LGBTQ people, including employment discrimination and restrictions on adoption and foster care. In 2010, she joined the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), founded just four years earlier, as an LGBTQ policy researcher. 

Goldberg describes her role as the organization’s newest head, a position she took in March, as “the dream job” where she’s able to marry her two passions: quantitative research and social change. That’s especially apparent when she talks about the think tank’s “Equality Maps” that track more than 50 LGBTQ-related laws and policies in the U.S.

Advancing LGBTQ equality — MAP’s sole focus when it first launched in 2006 — is personal for Goldberg, a lesbian who has been advocating for LGBTQ rights since the early aughts, when a wave of states adopted constitutional amendments and statutes banning same-sex marriage. 

“I feel so fortunate to have this opportunity,” she told The Hill in a recent interview. 

MAP’s second equality-minded project, a campaign called “Open to All,” launched in 2017 as a response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. In that case, the court sided with a baker who refused to design a wedding cake for a gay couple, raising alarm bells for MAP and Goldberg, then the director of the organization’s policy and research teams. 

“We recognized really early on that the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, while about a gay couple and a wedding cake, really had the potential to carve a huge hole through nondiscrimination laws for many people, including people of color, immigrants and women, as well as LGBTQ people and people who sit at the intersection,” Goldberg said. 

The Supreme Court last summer cited its decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop in also siding with a Christian web designer who refused to make same-sex wedding websites, bolstering conservative arguments that antidiscrimination laws may violate the First Amendment.

MAP’s 2017 campaign, now a coalition of more than 200 nonprofits, is rooted in the belief “that businesses open to the public should be open to all,” Goldberg said. 

In 2021, five years after MAP launched its “Open to All” campaign, the organization expanded its focus to track state election laws and policies, inspired in part by voter restrictions that went largely unchecked under former President Trump’s administration. Nineteen states in 2021, the first year of President Biden’s tenure, also passed laws restricting access to voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

“You cannot separate the experience of our democracy in 2016 through 2021 from the kind of crisis moment that we think we are at in terms of the health of democracy in the states and nationally,” Goldberg said.

Like the group’s Equality Maps, its “Democracy Maps” track state election laws in real time to provide policymakers and advocates with a blueprint for protecting voting rights. A state’s “democracy tally” counts the number of laws and policies that foster a healthy election system. 

“It’s really important to show all the different dimensions of elections and what it means to have a healthy, thriving democracy,” Goldberg said. “It’s really easy to point to misinformation or point to voter suppression, but we actually need to be thinking holistically about what democracy means, and I think our democracy maps allow for that sort of vantage point.”

With each of its projects, MAP’s goal is “to be accurate, to update in real time and to offer that kind of big picture look across the states and across many issues,” she added. 

The organization’s maps are used often by media, advocacy groups and state legislators advocating for progressive policy changes, Goldberg said. Last month, a resolution introduced by Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) referred to MAP by name.

Goldberg has big plans for MAP, including bringing on more communications and research staff and working more closely with lawmakers and the media. 

“We know the work that needs to be done, and I think MAP in particular sits in a unique place in our theory of change,” she said. “We really do believe that through deep listening, through conversations, through thoughtful and accurate policy research, we can change. We can create change in democracy, and we can create change for LGBTQ people in this country.”