President Obama is being pressed to disengage gay marriage issues from immigration reform by a coalition, which came together for the first time last week, representing about 30 million Hispanics of faith.
Obama garnered a huge number of votes from Hispanic voters during his re-election: Roughly 75 percent of Catholic Hispanics and about 50 percent of Evangelical Hispanics voted for him. However, experts say that the problem of gay marriage being linked with immigration reform has upset a lot of his key constituents.
The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), headed by their president, Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, said that Hispanic evangelicals are upset that the president is trying to tie LGBT issues with immigration reform issues.
The Southern Baptist Convention and the National Association of Evangelicals are backing the position held by the NHCLC along with various other groups. They don’t necessarily claim that President Obama should back away from gay rights. But they are saying that the president may be pushing too hard to package the issues together in the same civil rights context.
The coalition discussed various concerns with immigration reform. Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles in Washington,D.C., and Catholic pro-life and pro-justice leader said, “We had as a guest Sen. Rick Santorum and it was a very open conversation, even on immigration where we have some slight differences.”
Aguilar went on to say, “We saw Sen. Santorum really wanting to understand the community and he ended up articulating a very good position on immigration. It was really a discussion and it was great to see someone like Sen. Santorum meeting with Latino leaders of faith.”
Aguilar says the reason for the coalition is because of the “attacks” by the Obama administration on the culture of life and family values.
“All of them are conservative, we’re not saying Republican or Democrat, but we’re conservative because we’re for life, we’re for marriage and we’re for religious freedom and immigration reform,” Aguilar said, noting that he believes the group’s first meeting “will bear many fruits.”
As far as the LGBT community is concerned, unlike straight couples who can get married in order to seek green cards and then obtain citizenship for the non-American spouse, gay couples’ marriages are not recognized by the federal government because of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Thus even if married to an American citizen in a US state, the non-American partner is eventually deported.
But the Hispanic community, as a whole, value the “family structure” and are against any change thereof. The group doesn’t appear to want any change in the marriage act to be attached to immigration reform.
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