It's Not Ethnicity

It's religion that seems to be the determining factor in attitudes toward gay rights.

Joe Sudbay reports on this study, via this piece by Joseph M. Palacio in WaPo. Some interesting tidbits:

• 57% of Latino Catholics would vote for the legalization of same-sex marriage compared to 22% of Latino Protestants.

• Latino Catholics "say they trust the parents of gay and lesbian children more than their own clergy as a source of information about homosexuality."

Of course, the anti-gay, anti-Catholic right is on top of it. Bryan Fischer of the sadly misnamed American Family Association wants a religious test for immigrants.

Not so fast. According to the Christian Post, 57% of Latino Catholics in California support homosexual marriage. Let’s not forget that Latinos make up 36.6 percent of California’s population.

The good news, if you happen to be an evangelical, is that just 22 percent of Latino Protestants support gay marriage.

If getting pro-family illegals legalized is the goal, perhaps Dr. Land can be persuaded to amend his recommendation and give preference to Protestant illegal aliens.

Have you noticed that, as their "cause" migrates farther and farther to the fringe, the anti-gay right gets more and more open about their bigotry?

The irony here is painfully funny:

Latino Catholics orient their social lives around the family and extended family even in the context of high Latino single-parent households (estimated 33% of all U.S. Latino households; 36% of all Latino Children in California live in single-parent households). Family solidarity is strong and even though children may not follow "traditional family values" as projected by the church and the U.S. society, parents want to keep their children within the family. It is not surprising that Catholics in general and Latino Catholics in particular, as the Public Religion Research study shows, see that parents learn about gay issues from their children. Their moral and ethical judgments are primarily made through this social reality rather than abstract pronouncements from their church leaders.

My own experience supports that: I've worked with Latinos, and it's all about their families -- they socialize together, they buy property from each other, they take care of each other's kids, they take care of their parents. I know more about what's going on with their families than I do my own. (My father is notoriously reticent about "personal" things, a trait I seem to have inherited.)

So who really supports "family values"?

A conjecture: it seems that the more reality impinges on the Bryan Fischers of the world, the louder they have to scream, because they're running out of places to hide.

Here's Jim Burroway's commentary on that study. Worth a read.