Homophobia is alive and strong in the United States.

By contrast, homophobia is alive and strong in the United States as citizens in eleven U.S. states voted in November 2004 to ban gay marriage. Also in November, the Texas Board of Education pressured textbook publishers Holt, Rinehart, and Winston and Glencoe/McGraw-Hill to change all wording in their health texts to depict marriage strictly as the union of a man and a woman. Then there's the East Texas school district of Piano that was pressured into canceling "TWIRP Day" (a long-standing homecoming tradition of reversing social roles by having boys dress like girls and vice versa) and replacing it with "Camo Day" (where participants wear black boots and army camouflage). But there is good news. The U.S. Supreme Court, on November 29, declined to intervene in the ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Court that recognized the legality of gay marriage under that state's constitution. On the same day, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government can't withhold funds from colleges which, because of the military's discrimination against gays, choose to ban military recruiters from campus.