It is probably safe to say that most people know the human toll of discrimination against non-heterosexuals, even if the majority have not suffered it personally or indirectly through those they know.

Such discrimination usually gets voiced in social circles on an individual level: Diners at a restaurant fix denigrating stares on gay partners trying to enjoy a nice meal. A motorist yells a derogatory term at a lesbian couple taking a neighborhood stroll.

Of course, at other times prejudice against gays and lesbians makes the news: An openly gay man gets punched in the face, falls, gashes his head on pavement and dies, as several media outlets reported happened in 2007 outside a bar in Greenville. Same-sex couples visit the Richland County courthouse seeking marriage licenses in an annual public demonstration, and suffer heartbreak at being denied the right to matrimony.

Yes, the darkness that sexual orientation discrimination visits upon its victims emotionally, psychologically and physically is no secret.

However, the degrading nature of it on society permeates way beyond the human cost. For fair-minded people on the fence about issues such as gay marriage, there is another side to anti-gay culture — a, well, more practical side.

It can be described like that saying about the economics of race relations: It’s not about black and white. It’s about green.

“Gay and lesbian buying power reached $690 billion in 2007 and likely will top $712 billion in 2008,” says an article published in this month’s edition of Gay Business Report.

As it follows, the degree to which a community and state welcome or reject non-heterosexuals translates into a very real-world impact on the economy of that location.

For South Carolina — its dominant mores fostering a virtual hate state for gays and lesbians — it means opportunity lost. And if for no other reason, amid recessionary times, skyrocketing gasoline prices and economic development struggles, the financial toll of South Carolina’s anti-gay culture is important to consider.

It also is largely overlooked among the issues related to sexual orientation, receiving little or no study here or elsewhere in the nation. Nevertheless, plenty of anecdotal proof of it exists.

As with this form of discrimination itself, the economic impact of it produces negative results on both the macro and micro levels.

Among other ways, South Carolina perpetuates an anti-gay culture institutionally through its constitutional ban on legal recognition of same-sex partnerships. On an individual basis, the state exhibits intolerance toward non-heterosexuals via the likes of Irmo High School principal Eddie Walker, who announced in mid-May that he plans to retire at the end of the 2008-09 school year because some Irmo High students want to form a gay-straight alliance school club.

Likewise, the state’s institutional anti-gay culture hurts its economy as a whole, depressing business activity related to marriage, reducing if not eliminating tourism-related visits by gays and lesbians, and hampering efforts to recruit gay-friendly companies and their employees.

On the personal level, the homophobia South Carolinians display toward gay and lesbian residents harms the stability and financial security of same-sex relationships and threatens gays’ and lesbians’ job security.

But precisely measuring the economic impact of anti-gay culture is difficult.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which holds itself out as one of the nation’s foremost organizations advocating for non-heterosexuals, had more or less no comment about the issue.

“It’s speculative,” task force communications director Roberta Sklar said. Sklar would not comment further.

Yet speculative as it might be, the bottom-line fallout of discrimination against gays and lesbians is indisputable and overwhelmingly if not wholly adverse.

Looking at more numbers helps make the case.

For the second time in its history, the U.S. Census Bureau allowed same-sex couples living together to identify themselves as “unmarried partners” in the 2000 Census.

As a result, nearly 600,000 households did so nationally, representing a combined almost 1.2 million gay and lesbian adults, according to a 2002 report by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, the task force’s think tank. “Given the dearth of research on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people, the Census data offer much-needed basic demographic information which can help us better understand who we are and what we need,” the report says.

The total number of reported same-sex households in South Carolina in the 2000 Census: some 7,600, more than seven times as many in the 1990 edition of the nation’s largest survey. Richland County had the third largest number, 624, and Lexington County was fourth with 435.

A December 2005 study of black same-sex households, based on the 2000 Census, found that most are concentrated in the Palmetto State and other parts of the Southeast, many in small, rural municipalities like one near Columbia.

“The top 10 metropolitan areas with the highest proportion of black same-sex households among all same-sex households … include Sumter … ” says the study, by the task force Policy Institute and the Washington, D.C.-based National Black Justice Coalition, which fights discrimination against gay and lesbian African-Americans.

Gay Marriage and Money

Returning to gay marriage, it hugely exemplifies in dollar signs the return on anti-gay culture.

Right around the same time Principal Walker said he will quit his job because some Irmo High kids want to form a gay-straight alliance club, the California Supreme Court struck down the Golden State’s ban on same-sex marriage.

The ruling provides not only greater equality to gays and lesbians but also an expected boon to the California economy.

An estimated 67,000 or so gay couples will flock to the state to get married, says an ABC News report June 11, six days before California began issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

The dispatch cites an analysis by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law. The review lays out projections based on what Vermont and Massachusetts experienced after those states legalized, respectively, a form of legal recognition of same-sex couples known as a civil union and full-on same-sex marriage.

“Spending by resident same-sex couples on their weddings, and by out-of-state couples on tourism and their weddings, will boost California’s economy by over $683.6 million in direct spending” over the next three years, the ABC story says, quoting the Williams Institute research.

Says Mark Shields, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, which describes itself as the nation’s largest GLBT equal rights organization, “Even [California] Gov. [Arnold] Schwarzenegger has talked about how the equalization of marriage rights is going to be a great boon to the California economy.”

The South Carolina constitutional ban on gay marriage, as well as legal recognition by the state and its political subdivisions of any domestic union other than matrimony between a man and a woman, passed as a referendum in the November 2006 elections.

“The language was quite expansive,” Todd Shaw, a political science professor at USC and chairman of South Carolina Black Pride, says of the ballot question.

The black GLBT group plans to hold its third annual series of pride events June 25-29 in Columbia. The happenings include a town hall debate of whether the Bible says homosexuality is a sin, and a literature and music program.

The goings-on coincide with national HIV testing day June 27, when the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control will offer free or low-cost screenings for the virus that causes AIDS at DHEC county public health departments.

Even though a state law was on the books defining marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman, many elected officeholders in South Carolina pushed for the constitutional measure in a rank display of political opportunism and exploitation of the state’s anti-gay culture.

S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster, reportedly considering running for governor in 2010 and widely considered a formidable contender if he does, championed the ban as the “ultimate clarification.”

The discriminatory drumbeat worked.

More than 1 million voters weighed in on the question, passing it in a 77.9 percent landslide, according to state Election Commission records. All 46 counties in South Carolina approved it. The local ballot totals in favor of the measure were 66.7 percent in Richland County and 79.1 percent in Lexington County.

South Carolina is not alone in this regard though. Indeed, most states have inked laws and/or constitutional language prohibiting gay marriage, a tabulation by the National Conference of State Legislatures shows.

But that does not change the socially and financially degrading effects of the bans. In addition to the money South Carolina is losing out on by forbidding same-sex marriage, the restriction undermines the financial security of gay couples.

Rights and protections inherent in matrimony make day-to-day life for married couples and their families more stable and financially sound, Shields says. “So economically, marriage equality is a win-win.”

Conversely, marriage inequality is a lose-lose.

Whether it’s medical decisions, parental rights or property oversight, gay couples in South Carolina cannot exercise the same authority as married partners in the state can. And to be afforded even limited benefits of their unions, same-sex partners must have legal paperwork drafted, an onerous and costly burden.

For gays and lesbians who are out of the closet, job security also is a heightened concern because of frequent workplace discrimination against them.

A Matter of Perception

Another way that an anti-gay culture hurts a community’s and state’s economy on a macro level stems from how that location is perceived.

With tourism the No. 1 industry in South Carolina, the prevailing impression of the state in the GLBT community amounts to a death knell.

“There’s almost a sense of, you could get killed there,” says Ray Drew, director of South Carolina Equality, a group that works to equalize GLBT rights in the state.

The state should give pause to the dynamic, Shaw says. “I think South Carolina ought to think very directly about this economic impact because of our major industry of tourism,” he says.

The same applies to other industries, including the retirement business.

“Gay and lesbian [baby] boomers who’ve spent decades living and loving in the open are looking to age among others like them,” says a March 21 Scripps News article headlined “gays look toward sanctuaries in retirement.”

Drew knows what he’s talking about with respect to the image of the Palmetto State. At 45, he grew up in South Carolina, then spent 21 years out of state before returning six months ago to take his current job. Drew moved back here from San Diego, a progressive metropolis that he characterizes as one of the centers of the biotechnology industry in the United States.

When it comes to companies in that line of work, Drew says, “A big part of their decision on where to headquarter is where their ideal employees would like to live.” Young, smart college graduates, they “would simply never live in South Carolina,” he says.

That point speaks to yet a third major way that discrimination against non-heterosexuals exacts an economic price.

Gay-friendly companies are unlikely to locate somewhere hostile to the GLBT community. “They would really weigh it as to whether they’re going to do business with that state,” says Chuck Archie, president of the South Carolina Gay and Lesbian Business Guild.

In an example of the monetary clout of the Gay and Lesbian Business Guild, it held its annual business expo June 12 in Columbia. The expo provides an opportunity for the guild to try to build the local and statewide economy of the GLBT community through networking. Established in 1993, the guild claims about 170 members — 27 of them corporate, twice as many as this time in 2007, Archie says. “We have a lot of straight members as well.”

The guild meets monthly and also holds a yearly awards ceremony. “We just try to bring people together of what we call like minds,” he says.

Even certain representatives of the corporate world acknowledge the impact on the bottom line of discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Marcia Purday, spokeswoman for the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, acknowledges it indirectly.

At many large companies, Purday says, workers with common interests coalesce into affinity groups in an effort to address their concerns. It is true of Asians, women, blacks and others, she says. “And, the gay population as well.”

The diversity departments of the firms coordinate with the groups, Purday says. “What makes a company strong is including people of a lot of different backgrounds,” she says.

Insofar as directly addressing the economic impact of anti-gay culture, Purday says that without statistics on it “I really can’t speculate as to what that” would be.

Ike McLeese, president and CEO of the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce, isn’t so hushed about the matter.

McLeese cites The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida in maintaining that a hostile atmosphere toward non-heterosexuals is a big negative for places that exhibit it.

In his book, Florida argues that locations that do not extend a sense of acceptance and welcoming of diversity face far more difficulty attracting the companies and employees of the new, knowledge-based economy.

They are the types of firms, McLeese says, that USC hopes to draw to its Innovista research campus that is under construction.

He says he cannot quantify the relationship between such economic development and intolerance toward non-heterosexuals. Instead, McLeese makes an analogy. “It’s the same thing I used to tell people about the Confederate flag,” he says of the years the rebel banner flew atop the State House dome.

Companies did not announce that they were bypassing South Carolina because of the flag, McLeese says.

Similarly, they don’t go public about opting against a community because it isn’t gay friendly. “They just don’t come,” he says, “and you don’t even know you’ve been rejected. Perception alone takes you out of the game.”

So South Carolina, led by many of its elected representatives, can hold tight its preponderance of anti-gay prejudice. But in so doing, the state is stilting its economic development, on both the large-scale and individual levels, to say nothing of the toll such discrimination takes on people personally and the state’s reputation.