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)
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.