Samuel Rodriguez has appointed himself to be the spokesman for all Hispanic-Americans, telling Republican leaders that Latinos are just itching to vote for Republicans if only they put a greater emphasis on their anti-choice and anti-gay positions while moderating their rhetoric around immigration.
During an interview on BreakPoint, Rodriguez described a meeting with Karl Rove where they predicted that the majority of Latino voters will back Republicans, a political prognostication that has been proven very wrong, and found it completely inconceivable that any Christian would support Democratic candidates over Republicans. He reasoned that the GOP “provoked the Hispanic community to go and vote for a party that does not affirm the values of life and the strengthening of marriage that Hispanics hold as sacred values” by not supporting immigration reform during Bush’s second term. “The Democratic platform does not resonate or reflect the core values of the Hispanic-American community; that’s not anecdotal that is a matter of quantitative fact,” he said.
But as we’ve noted before, a majority of Latinos support a woman’s right to choose and marriage equality.
He went on to say that Latinos (and African Americans) are backing Democrats by wide margins because “we vote our ethnicity” and “vote our cultural heritage rather than our Christian worldview,” contradicting his claim that Latino culture makes them Republicans.
The Democratic platform does not resonate or reflect the core values of the Hispanic-American community, that’s not anecdotal that is a matter of quantitative fact. Every single survey, even the recent Barna survey, reaffirms that finding. The fact of the matter is, the disconnect exists because of the rhetoric. Forty-four percent of Hispanics supported George W. Bush in 2004, forty-four percent. Karl Rove and I sat down and we predicted in 2006 that in 2008 fifty-two percent of Hispanics would go GOP, and for at least a generation that number would continue to go up. Then came immigration reform, and at the end of the day that sort of ‘we don’t know whether this party really wants us’ provoked the Hispanic community to go and vote for a party that does not affirm the values of life and the strengthening of marriage that Hispanics hold as sacred values.
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I have to say this to ethnic communities: putting President Obama aside, the African American and the Latino community, we suffer from what I call vertical myopia. That is to say that many of us go to the voting booth and we vote our ethnicity, rather than our Christian worldview. I find that to be a problem, as a believer, as a follower of Christ, as a born again Christian, I find it to be a significant problem biblically and theologically, when we vote our cultural heritage rather than our Christian worldview.
Rodriguez also claimed that Obama’s second term will bring about a “greater erosion of our religious liberties” and even charged that under the Obama administration, “Christians that stand up for biblical marriage will be continued to be labeled with a de facto sort of federal endorsement as bigoted and homophobic” if they do not “surrender Christianity on the altar of political expediency.”
I think we’re going to see greater erosion of our religious liberties. I think we’re going to see those Christians that stand up for biblical marriage will be continued to be labeled with a de facto sort of federal endorsement as bigoted and homophobic. I think the war on the biblical doctrine of marriage will continue to increase. At the end of the day, it’s going to prompt the Christian community to say: is this the generation that will surrender Christianity on the altar of political expediency or will we activate or engage in a prophetic posture?
