As lawmakers across the country continue to debate LGBTQ+ rights in 2025, Pennsylvania remains behind when it comes to safety and protections for LGBTQ+ residents. A national report from SafeHome, published in November 2024, ranked Pennsylvania 36 out of 51 for LGBTQ+ safety, with an overall grade of D — placing it behind states like Utah (35), Oklahoma (32), and even Arkansas (18). Months later, the report’s findings remain relevant, highlighting gaps in legal protections and ongoing disparities that impact LGBTQ+ Pennsylvanians today.
Interestingly, Pennsylvania’s next-door neighbor Delaware came out smelling much sweeter, ranking number 3, after Rhode Island and New Hampshire, with an overall safety grade of A+.
What accounts for the drastic difference between two states that share so much in terms of history and geography?
Delaware is one of the country’s smaller states, and has traditionally been consistently on the blue side of the political spectrum. One of the factors that account for Delaware’s high safety grade is that it was one of the earliest states to legalize same-sex marriage in 2013. Also, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, Delaware has the sixth highest number of same-sex couple households of almost 8 per 1,000 households, giving it an LGBTQ+ population density ratio comparable to Massachusetts and California.
Delaware offers a comprehensive set of LGBTQ-friendly legal protections, including:
• Laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity surrounding the use of surrogate mothers;
• Laws that protect people from conversion therapy;
• Bans on insurance exclusions for transgender healthcare.
These protections, along with Delaware’s extremely low incidence of hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people, according to SafeHome’s analysis, made it one of the safest states for LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. in 2024.
One big factor that differentiates Delaware from Pennsylvania is size. Delaware is a small, relatively urbanized state that allows it to maintain a more cohesive political demographic than Pennsylvania, which, being so much larger, is much more diverse socioeconomically — and politically. A look at the electoral map from the last presidential election will show that, aside from the blue enclaves in the urbanized Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, most of the less populated counties in Pennsylvania are staunchly Republican red.
While Pennsylvania quickly followed Delaware by legalizing same-sex marriage in 2014, the state still ranks relatively high (13th) in number of reported hate crimes, according to Statista. Also, the state has been slow to adopt statewide laws prohibiting LGBTQ+ discrimination. While more than 40 local governments in Pennsylvania have ordinances prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and the state’s Human Relations Commission accepts anti-LGBTQ discrimination complaints, there is no Pennsylvania law that specifically prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
SafeHome’s safety ranking is based on a composite safety score comprising a law score and a hate-crime score. A “law score” was calculated based on pro- and anti-equality laws in each state. One of SafeHome’s prime sources of data was the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) 2023 State Equality Index State Scorecards which show a breakdown of each U.S. state’s pro and anti-equality legislation.
The “hate crime” score is taken from data compiled by the FBI and other state law enforcement agencies. The 2022 FBI Uniform Crime Report’s Hate Crime Statistics Collection was used to count the number of relevant incidents in each state and divide them based on whether they happened in a rural or urban area. It should be noted that the reported incidence of hate crimes versus the actual incidence rate may vary by relevant agency and, therefore, may not be a perfect representation of the actual hate crime landscape. Not every law enforcement agency in each state reported hate crime incidents to the FBI, which also factored into each state’s score.
Interestingly, some of the rankings on the list are surprisingly counter-intuitive; several red states are, apparently, relatively safe for LGBTQ people, such as Alaska, which got an A, and North Dakota, which got a B. However, the nine states graded F are firmly in the right-wing Republican camp: Mississippi, Kentucky, Arizona, West Virginia, Alabama, Ohio, Wyoming, Florida and South Dakota.