UPDATED: In Wake Of Scandalous Resignation, Puerto Rico Senator’s Homophobic Legacy Lives On
Guest Author Andrés Duque shares this important story with The New Civil Rights Movement. It is cross posted from his own site, Blabbeando.
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Last week Republican Puerto Rican Senator Roberto Arango became embroiled in a public scandal when images of a shirtless man who appeared to be him were leaked to the press.
The images were from the gay dating phone app Grindr, which was a tad curious considering Arango’s public image was that of a divorced heterosexual man who was raising a daughter. The Senator was also known for voting in favor of several anti-gay bills.
Initially, Arango scoffed at suggestions that he was the man in the images. Then he admitted he often took photos of himself shirtless to document a weight-loss regimen but didn’t remember taking those specific images. When more explicit images leaked out, the Senator stopped talking to media altogether.
Yesterday, he resigned from the Senate.
Our favorite Latino gossip site Guanabee, broke the news in the United States. Since then, several people have asked me if I have documentation of the Senator’s homophobia. It’s been surprisingly tough to find articles and reports because most of it is offline. But, going through my files, I managed to find a few tidbits.
In early 2007 reports emerged that a legislative commission studying changes to Puerto Rico’s Civil Code was considering allowing civil unions for all couples regardless of sexual orientation. Conservative religious organizations were outraged and warned that civil unions would weaken marriage and change the family structure. They mounted a campaign against the measure and Senator Arango served as their messenger in the legislature.
From “La Católica contra unions de hecho / The Catholic leadership against civil unions†(El Vocero, March 27, 2007 – No online link):
From his seat in the Senate chamber, Senator Roberto Arango of the New Progressive Party spoke about the recent mandates from the Catholic Church regarding the governing body and announced he would present thousands of signatures against changes to the book of law.
According to his statements, the signatures were given to him on Saturday during a rosary ceremony organized by the Catholic Church on the vicinity of the Capitol building. The signers want to put a stop to the proposed changes to the Civil Code that have received sustained opposition from the more conservative organizations.
“We have received 150,000 petitions signed by people of all orientations in favor of maintaining the current Civil Code,†said Arango during yesterday’s senate session. “We will hand them over to the Secretary of the Senate so they take into consideration the massive support of the people.â€
The pressure from conservative groups led the legislative commission to shelve debate on changes to the Civil Code.
Emboldened by their success, religious organizations went a step further and called for an amendment to the state constitution banning legal recognition of any relationship other than marriages between a man and a woman.
A bill was quickly introduced and, on November 7th of 2007, it passed in the Senate by a vote of 20 to 2 and 1 abstention. Senator Arango voted in favor (a tally of those voting in favor can be found in a blog post by leading Puerto Rican LGBT rights advocate Pedro Julio Serrano titled “The New Progressive Party and the LGBT communityâ€).
“Resolución 99”, as the constitutional amendment bill is known in Puerto Rico, was blocked in the House of Representatives that same year and proponents have dropped efforts to re-introduce it for now.
In September of 2009, Senator Kimmey Raschke managed to sneak in a bill banning adoption rights for gays by keeping the language of the bill under wraps until the last day of the legislative session. Arango, a close ally of Raschke, defended the secrecy behind the bill and assured reporters that it would be brought to the Senate floor. From “La adopción en el menú del dia / Adoption on the day’s menu†(El Nuevo Dia, September 25, 2009) :
“You will see the bill. I already spoke with Tommy [Puerto Rican Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz]â€, said Arango, who stated that he had yet to see the amendments despite being a member of the conference committee created to iron out the [bill language] differences between the legislative bodies.
Arango would go on to vote in favor of the adoption ban and the bill. It eventually passed both houses and is currently the law in Puerto Rico.
The allegation that had been the toughest to confirm over the weekend were reports that during his first senate election campaign, Arango had held a rubber duck at a public campaign stop and mocked an opponent’s sexuality by making quaking noises and calling him a “pato†[“Patoâ€, the Spanish word for “duckâ€, is used in the island as a pejorative word for gays, akin to calling someone a “faggot†in English].
Lucky for us, today’s print issue Primera Hora includes it in a chronology of the Senator’s career and even provides a photo.
The chronology says that Arango’s political career began in 2004 when he led the Bush – Cheney presidential re-election campaign in Puerto Rico. It was then that Arango decided to run for office and became a strong ally of San Juan mayoral candidate Jorge Santini. And it was at a Santini campaign event that Arango called Santini’s opponent a ‘pato’.
From the chronology:
On October of 2004, at the closing of the San Juan mayoral campaign, rumors of [Eduardo] Bhatia’s homosexuality spread through the New Progressive Party’s rally and its leaders as they danced to a song with a chorus duck quacks. A featherless rubber chicken was thrown at the stage and rescued by Arango who referred to it as a ‘rubber duckie’
A photo caption reads Arango was overheard talking about Bhatia to someone else on the stage and saying “No le vamos a dar donde le gusta… sino hasta dentro del pelo”. It’s a difficult phrase to translate but could be interpreted to mean “We won’t give it where he likes it… instead we’ll drill it deep inside him.â€
In researching these articles, I reached out to my friend Pedro Julio Serrano, founder of the leading LGBT-rights organization Puerto Rico Para Todos. He sent me this excerpt from a press release he released to Puerto Rican media yesterday (a full Spanish-language statement is available at Pedro Julio’s blog):
This isn’t a moment to kick someone when he’s down, but I have to denounce senator Roberto Arango’s complicity with a fundamentalist agenda that promotes the exclusion and marginalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. His votes in favor of Resolution 99 which would have amended Puerto Rico’s constitution to ban the recognition of the freedom to marry for same-sex couples, his homophobic acts such as using a rubber duck to make fun of an opponent because in Puerto Rico the word duck means ‘faggot,’ and violating his constitutional duty to guarantee equality for all should be the real reasons for his resignation.
In the meantime, Arango might be gone from the Senate but his legacy remains.
Yesterday’s Primera Hora reports that the legislature seems ready to re-open debate of changes to the Civil Code — except for parts of the draft that address civil unions or partnership rights for same-sex couples (“Family topic postponed in Civil Code debateâ€).
That sole part of the draft caused so much public controversy that it swallowed the rest of the work that had been done and there was no expectation that we’d get back to it,†said Jennifer Gonzalez, President of the Puerto Rican House of Representatives, “So what did we do? We looked at all the [Civil Code] books and we took out those issues that might generate public controversy and that might block passage of the other books, and we will start with those four.
Allegedly, once there is legislative agreement on the ‘non-controversial’ areas, they will come back to address whether the gays deserve human rights. In other words, Arango’s homophobic spirit lives on in the Puerto Rican congress.
UPDATE:Â This is my exact point —
Not one hour after I posted this entry a friend on Twitter alerted me to an article from today’s El Vocero (“Rivera Schatz: Bhatia and Garcia Padilla are the ones who should talk the least“).
While Arango has yet to speak to press about his resignation, it was a close ally, Senate Presdent Thomas Rivera-Schatz who yesterday told reporters he had received the resignation letter from Arango. Today, in an audio interview posted in El Vocero, Rivera-Schatz goes after Arango’s past political opponents and tells them to watch their words.
So, get this: Arango quacked like a duck when making fun of then mayoral candidate Eduardo Bhadia all those years ago in 2004. Today, now that he has resigned, we get this from the Senate President:
People are tired of “the bla, bla, bla of the PPD President and the ‘quack’, ‘quack’, ‘quak’ from Bhadia”
So there you have it. The Puerto Rican Senate President calling Bhadia a fag just today. INCREDIBLE.
Pedro Julio has replied (“Rivera Shatz reckless and recurring homophobia condemned“. He states, in part, “It’s not the first time that Rivera Shatz has recklessly used sexist and homophobic comments, as he has called us ‘mentally ill, deviant and criminal.”
Pedro Julio calls for Rivera Shatz to keep his homophobia in check or resign.
Andrés Duque is long-time LGBT-rights advocate and award-winning Latino gay blogger. He writes at Blabbeando.
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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.
“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”
“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”
NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).
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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.
38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”
“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”
62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”
NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”
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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”
Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.
“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.
But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”
A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.
Watch the video below or at this link.
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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won
Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.
In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”
“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.
The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”
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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.
In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.
“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”
Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.
“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”
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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”
“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”
He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.
Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.
After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”
“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.
“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter
One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.
Watch the video above or at this link.
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“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”
“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”
Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”
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“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”
Biden on campus protests: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. The people are heard. In fact, peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to controversial issues. But neither are we a lawless country.” pic.twitter.com/1HYLVmbN2D
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 2, 2024
America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”
“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”
“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”
Biden: Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It is against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations, none of this is a peaceful protest. pic.twitter.com/0Nkttggsy4
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 2, 2024
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The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.
Watch the videos above or at this link.
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