Republicans alienate gays and now Latinos
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Andrew Sullivan QUICK LOOK:"I've been thinking I might leave the party. A lot of my Latino Republican friends have been talking about it after this law," - Adam Bustos, a third-generation Mexican-American, who has voted Republican since Ronald Reagan ran for president. The GOP is now doing to Latinos what it did to gays. Its leaders - by backing the Federal Marriage Amendment in the last decade and now the Arizona law in this - are essentially saying that they do not understand how these measures could impact a minority's collective psyche. Whatever the technical merits of either measure - and there were intellectually coherent (if, to my mind, unpersuasive) defenses of both - the lack of empathy or understanding is the real issue. It places the Republican "us" against the minority "them." This is not just a failure of empathy; it is failure of judgment. The votes of Latinos will be massively important in the very near future, and the number of people who know and love gay people grows daily. |
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