Thread: President of MALDEF Makes Amnesty Pitch To Gay Activists

Get your barf bags ready.

http://www.feministing.com/archives/019923.html

@ Creating Change 2010: Opening Plenary

Jos and I are at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Conference, Creating Change, this weekend and we'll be blogging from the conference. If you want to follow what's going on, you can check out the twitter hashtag #cc10.

Thomas Saenz, President, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund's remarks after the jump.

In these six months I've had the opportunity to give a lot of speeches and I can say that this is the largest and most energetic crowd.
We are an organization founded 42 years ago in San Antonio, Texas. Welcome to Texas. Our organization was founded when Latino lawyers recognized the need for leaders in the Latino civil rights community.

MALDEF was modeled after the NAACP legal defense fund. We do our work in education, employment, immigrants rights and voting rights.

We see a decade of opportunity and great challenge ahead of us. The prospect of finally moving toward comprehensive immigration reform.

Of course, as you all know, a legalization program that would recognize and acknowledge the significant contributions of millions who have labored and lived in the shadows. The center piece of immigration reform would be a path to citizenship and legal status.

A critical part of MALDEF's heritage and history is collaboration and partnership with other communities. It has been one of my goals, as the new president, to deepen or collaboration and partnership with the LGBT community.

There are pundits who opine freely that our two communities cannot work together because of the philosophy and beliefs of the Latino community. This is deeply flawed. There is great commonality and interest. Beginning with the fact that our two communities overlap.

MALDEF has always prided ourselves with including in our staff high level LGBT Latinos.

Tonight I want to focus on some strong similarities:

1) Many of the members of our communities continue to live in the shadows about our status. Undocumented immigrants and LGBT folks. Fear of law enforcement and hate crimes.

2) People assume that our communities are single issue--immigration reform and marriage equality. We know that our movements are enduring.

3) We both face forces in Washington and elsewhere that would seek to exclude us from the 2010 census.

4) Our two communities are victims of the courage deficit in Washington.

5) Significant portions of our community have been outside of constitutional law.
Undocumented immigrants and LGBT folks should be accorded the same protections that other groups have been accorded for the last fifty years.

Our immigration system is discriminatory. The courts provide complete discretion to Congress in determining what immigration laws will be. We have a system that does not provide legal representation, often even a hearing, for decisions that are life and death for some families.

We have a system that allows law enforcement to make assumptions based on race. That is inconsistent with our constitutional values. That means outlawing racial profiling through the nation.

We must reintroduce equal protection values into our definition of family under our immigration law.

Ultimately comprehensive reform is absolutely necessary.

Posted by Miriam - February 04, 2010, at 09:06PM

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ROFL!! Is he kidding?!?! Look to how mexico and other central american countries treat lesbians and especially gay men.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Mexico

http://www.youth-suicide.com/gay-bisexual/links5a-3.htm

The thing that sticks out to me about this disingenuous spiel is how utterly solipsistic it is. Every time he mentions the "LGBT community" it's solely to reference his group's agenda, i.e. complete and total amnesty for every Mexican national residing in this country illegally.

That's what amuses me about the professional Mexican activists who want to open our Southern borders to all comers. Even when they mention other nationalities who would presumably benefit from the enactment of another amnesty it's done purely for aesthetics. In other words, they use it because arguing their own position, i.e. Mexican nationals here illegally-and Mexicans not living here, but who want to come here-deserve preferential treatment over every other individual and/or group that seeks citizenship, esp. those that do so through the proper legal channels, would be rejected by the American public out of hand.

Does anyone here think that Mr. Saenz would give a second thought to the thousands of illegal aliens from Ireland, or China, or Eastern Europe, if a bill were passed that denied them citizenship, but granted it to his fellow compadres?