Integrity News

Today I am busy preparing for my trip to Washington, DC. As many of you are already aware, I wrote a resolution for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) ”To Urge the US Congress to Pass the Military Readiness Enhancement Act (HR 1246).” Some of our Texas congressional representatives have stated and/or implied that their Hispanic constituents may not be very gay-friendly, so the Congressperson can’t publicly support any bill supporting gay people. The goal of this project -writing, approving and sharing this resolution with Congress - is to prove them wrong. The members of LULAC are politically active Hispanics - they’re the ones who are voting. And if they support MREA, then why doesn’t their representative?

Politicians and political pundits often say that family is important to Hispanic people and so is faith. Despite my own Hispanic heritage, I find this somewhat insulting. First, I am an American - citizen of the United States. My culture and personality are American. Sure, I have a lot of traits and quirks that you could connect to my Hispanic ancestry, but they are still a part of the American me. Second, are family and faith more important to Hispanics than to other ethnic/race/nationality groups? Not hardly. I’ve known very close and loving families who were of Italian, Irish, Polish, and other national origins - in fact, most of them are mixed with a little bit of this and a little bit of that bringing all kinds of traditions together to make every family unique. Some of those families were a lot closer than Hispanic families I know. And the same thing goes for faith.

When it comes to gay people, aren’t we a part of someone’s family, too? What about those families who have gay sons and daughters, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters? Don’t you think that in a close family, they value the gay relatives, too? Don’t you think that the straight family members would expect you to respect their gay relatives? And in the military, DADT not only silences gay soldiers, but also the straight soldiers who have gay brothers. I even had a soldier whose wife was raised by her gay dad and his partner.

Back to the trip. We’ll also be visiting with members of the Texas congressional delegation. So far I have scheduled and confirmed appointments with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Reps. Ron Paul, Charles Gonzalez, Sam Johnson, Henry Cuellar and Silvestre Reyes. We’ll also drop off copies of the resolution with every Texas office. At the LULAC business meeting, the entire assembly will vote on the resolution.

So during the next week, if I seem to be inactive it’s probably because I have been traipsing around the capital. I’ll try to make some time to update everyone on what we accomplish.