Posted on 05/10/2012 12:46:09 PM PDT by SmithL
One key point conservatives made in today’s story about President Obama backing same sex marriage is that it would drive away conservative Latino and African-American voters. That’s what folks like conservative activist Gary Marx told us.
That possibility “is wildly unlikely,” said Gary Segura, professor of American Politics and Chicano Studies at Stanford University and a principal in the polling firm Latino Decisions.
While many Latinos are Catholic, a religion which does not condone same sex marriage, Segura said Latinos rarely let their religious beliefs steer their votes.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.sfgate.com ...
Precisely.
You are too pessimistic by far. It is about time that the GOP reach out to ghetto and barrio for votes on social conservative issues. If Obozo hands us political gifts, we ought to take them. We don't have to carry ghetto or barrio. We just need to minimize the virtual unanimity we perceive in their vote or minimize the votes of those who just will not consider voting other than for Obozo and his party.
Nothing wrong with that, but pandering and amnesty are worse than useless. For example, McCain in 2008 after pushing amnesty hard.
“Follow the money.”
Nope. It’s 100% race-hate.
First: Do you have any better ideas than gay marriage of how to antagonize Hispanics and blacks into voting against Obama, or at least staying home?
Second: There was a day when people said southern whites would never vote for the party of Lincoln. There was a day when people said Catholic blue collar union workers would never vote against the party of Kennedy. Social issues were key in convincing many people in both groups that being a good conservative Southern evangelical or a good cradle Catholic meant switching parties. I'm well aware there were other factors, but religion was key in making temporary alliances into permanent changes in demographic voting patterns.
Massive and long-term electoral change can happen based on religious beliefs, for better or for worse. I can't think of anything that Barack Obama could do which would be more likely to antagonize blacks and Hispanics than what he just did.
Let's not turn down this gift. We may not get another chance. Something simply must be done to break the stranglehold of the Democratic Party on its black and Hispanic voting bloc, because white guys are getting old and aren't having enough kids to retain a conservative majority much longer.
Let's push this one hard.
Hispanics & Latinos who agree with me that marriage is between a man and woman: 3.
Hispanics & Latinos who agree with President Obama that's it's "equality" for "consenting adults" if you legalize marriage for gays, but no other non-traditional sexual relationships: 14. (one of whom just unfriended me)
Yep, sure... "Hispanics are very devout Catholics who are pro-traditional marriage and natural Republicans". Not on the planet I'm living on, or at least, not the ones living in the Chicago area.
I think alot of the GOP is in denial. Yes, there are millions of "socially conservative" Hispanics in the U.S. who are "natural Republicans". I know one who is a naturalized U.S. citizen who came here from Mexico as a child, and she is indeed pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, strongly Catholic, etc., and voted for Rick Santorum in the GOP primary.
But she is FAR outnumbered by the number of SOCIALLY LIBERAL Hispanics that I know personally and have had countless arguments with over Obama's health-care mandate for free contraceptives (they SUPPORT forcing the Catholic Church to pay for people's contraceptives), and Obama's endorsement of gay marriage (they AGREE with him that letting gays marry whoever they want is somehow "equality")
The majority of Hispanics are LIBERAL on social issues (or least less conservative on those than their Anglo counterparts in the Catholic Church)
However Latinos are not as entheusiatic about Obama as they were in 2008. In these election he is going to lose 10% to 15% of the Latinos who voted for in 2008. In these elections he is going to lose 20% of the Whites who voted for him in 2008...In other word he is going to lose the elections.
I certainly don't disagree that the Hispanic community ranges from devout Mass-going Catholics to wildly promiscuous people who created the stereotypes of Latin lover men and sexually easy or at least exotically flirtatious women. Even in the Cuban community, which is probably the most conservative due to its anticommunism, we're kidding ourselves if we think pre-Castro Cuba was a model of free enterprise. That island was in serious trouble due to organized crime as well as rural land barons no better than much of the rest of Latin America, and arguably worse. While lots of modern Cubans have become supporters of free enterprise because of their experience in Florida, that doesn't necessarily mean they're social conservatives.
Rural Southern whites also range from Bible Baptists to people who created the stereotypes associated with the Dukes of Hazzard. Similar things could be said of a number of other ethnic groups where the Republican Party has made successful inroads over the years, including my own Italian heritage which a century ago had horrible stereotypes which were parallel in many ways to modern Hispanic culture.
The question is which people within the subculture will be assisted in providing leadership.
The Democrats like to promote people like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Ramón Villaraigosa to positions of prominence, and there are lots of Hispanics who secretly envy him for his ability to get hot anchorbabes into bed such as Mirthana Salias of Telemundo and former Miss South Carolina Lu Parker of KTLA, just like there are lots of Southern whites who envied Bill Clinton's ability to get pretty much any woman he wanted. Base instincts have a powerful draw.
Republicans have our share of moral problems too, but we don't promote such people as role models to be enjoyed. On the contrary, we generally find people who are successful in business or the military or some other field where long hours of hard work is required for success, and that tends to mean people who have at least somewhat stable family lives because the type of women who are attracted to playboy types are generally high-maintenance and don't provide the stability needed to succeed in professions where long hours and self-discipline are required.
Long-term cultural change requires promoting the right sort of role models while creating incentives to average people to engage in productive behavior rather than bad behaviors which may feel good for a while but long term are destructive to themselves as well as the broader culture.
Modern Democrats are good at pushing short-term rewards of pleasure — talking liberty but promoting licentiousness. Modern Republicans are a lot better at promoting the sort of values that actually work in bringing poor people out of poverty.
It's all about which value system we want to encourage.
I don’t think that many people consider Hispanics living in Chicago to be “natural Republicans” any more than Anglos living in Chicago are “natural Republicans.” Hispanics in Texas and Florida, though, are far more conservative, and Hispanics living in states without large Hispanic populations tend to vote about the same as Anglos do.
Obama coming out of the closet on marriage will help Romney reduce Obama’s vote margin among Hispanics by making it harder for socially conservative or religious Hispanics to convince themselves that Obama is not a social liberal, and so its okay to vote for him, which will result in some of them voting for Romney but an even larger number of them staying home or at least not volunteering to campaign for Obama and get people to the polls.
The person who unfriended me on facebook is a fine example of how the GOP script about "social conservatives and natural Republicans" doesn't work in real life. She's a second generation Mexican American who lives in northwest Indiana and is a weekly church goer. She's raising a single daughter and has strong family ties and the girls aunts and uncles, both set of grandparents, etc., are involved in her life. She works an honest job and struggles to make ends met. According to the GOP script, she should be a "natural Republcian" She unfriended me today because I cried fowl when she posted banned congratulating Obama on gay marriage, and I pointed out her beliefs conflicted with her Catholic faith (and again, she's a weekly church goer, not a Christmas & Easter Catholic). She then called me a "bigot" who "hates gay people" and unfriended me, especially since she's helping indoctrinate her 13 year old daughter to support gay marriage and I questioned that.
Yes, so, so true, and even if not all the promised freebies arrive, their faith is so strong that merely the hope of new freebies in the future will sustain them.
Hispanic people in my neighborhood appear to be very religious, lots of evangelicals too. I would doubt it if they are socially liberal. But they’ll vote for the rat machine candidate anyway.
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