From the Mount
The day after Barack Obama's win, think tanks used the words "surge," "swept," and "broadly rejected" to describe Latino voting patterns in different parts of the country. Two thirds of Latino voters nationwide picked Obama over McCain. Latinos in California favored Obama by 74%. And in Florida, 57% of Latino voters picked the Illinois senator. I'm not going to get into the social science ring with any of these groups because my credentials are a political science degree and a dozen years of reporting. So I'll tell you what I saw at one precinct on Election Day at the Templo Sinai. The evangelical church on Flower Street in Santa Ana volunteered to serve as polling booth for a huge, six-thousand voter Orange County precinct. An hour before polls closed about nine activists held up Proposition 8 signs to passing cars, eliciting honks, hollers, yells and yelps.
U.S.-born Anabel Gil, a 20 year old law firm file clerk who'd walked out of high school a few years ago during the massive immigration rallies, shook a "No on 8" sign as if she were a priest double fisting holy water blessings with an aspergillum in each hand. The plight of gay relatives, she said, brought her out on Election night.She'd voted inside Templo Sinai earlier in the day against the ban on gay marriage and for Barack Obama.
On the opposite side of the street Fernando Ceron, a 38 year old naturalized U.S. citizen from the state of Veracruz held up a hand-drawn "Yes on 8" sign. He's an evangelical Christian from a state that's a religious crossroads. My grandmother was born into a Seventh Day Adventist family there in the 1920s. And my uncle, her oldest son, likes to tell the story of the Mormon young woman he thought was trying to seduce him. Into the religion, he later found out.
Ceron says the worst thing that could happen to his kids is for them to grow up in a world where gay men and lesbians walk up and down the street holding hands and kissing. He doesn't want his children to be confused, he added, about who's the mother and who's the father. He'd also stepped into Templo Sinai earlier in the day to cast his ballot for Proposition 8 and for Barack Obama, the candidate he trusts best represents Latino interests.
Anabel Gil complains that on this night she's outnumbered three to one on the gay marriage issue. It's all right, she says, when she walked out of classes a few years ago and joined the huge Southern California protests, it was to push people to voice their opinion, even if she doesn't agree with it.
The image associated with this post was taken by Flickr user Barack Obama. It was used under Creative Commons license.