Schlafly: Latinos aren't Republicans because of 'illegitimate' babies and handouts

Eagle Forum founder and long-time strident anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly told a conservative radio host last week that the Republican Party is making a terrible mistake targeting Latinos for outreach. Latinos, she said, in an interview excerpt posted at Right Wing Watch, can never be proper Republicans because they have too many children out of wedlock and because they "don't understand" concepts like small government and the U.S. Bill of Rights.

Schlafly has made no secret of her disdain for the Republican Party's attempts at outreach to minorities, particularly Hispanics. She said that for Republican elected officials to back comprehensive immigration reform would be "suicide" for the party because immigrants are only interested in getting "a handout" from the government.

Last week, in an interview with the conservative radio program "The Clay and Marty Show," Schlafly let fly with a blast of completely unfiltered anti-Latino racism.

"The people that Republicans ought to reach out to are the white voters," she said by phone. Latino voters, she maintained, will never vote Republican because they don't "have Republican inclinations at all. They're running an illegitimacy rate that's just about the same as the blacks are."

Furthermore, she said, "The plain fact is they come from a country where they have no experience of limited government and the types or rights we have in the Bill of Rights. They don't understand that at all. You can't even talk to them about what the Republican principle is."

Schlafly apparently believes that all Latinos in the U.S. come from one "big government," handout-happy country, presumably Mexico. However, according to the U.S. Tax Policy Center, Mexico is one of the three countries on the planet that boasts a lower tax rate that the U.S., alongside Chile and Turkey. Additionally, the U.S. spends $8,233 each year per citizen on public and private health costs, whereas Mexico spends $962, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

"What the Republicans should be doing," Schlafly continued, "is reaching out to our own American citizens and the black community."

She went on to trumpet the conservative victory over same sex marriage in Illinois, in which the Illinois state legislature failed to pass a law making same sex marriage legal in the state.

"And the reason is because we reached out to the black people," Schlafly said, citing the efforts of "a wonderful black pastor in Chicago who did robo-calls for us."

Illinois LGBT activists told the Chicago Tribune on Thursday that Wednesday's Supreme Court rulings on the Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8 have left them energized and ready to take up the fight anew.

"I see these decisions bringing renewed energy to the marriage fight in Springfield," said Bernard Cherkasov, CEO of Equality Illinois to the Tribune. "We now have two classes of citizens in Illinois — people who can access federal benefits (because they're married) and those who can't until lawmakers act. Every day they don't act is another day Illinoisans can't access those protections."

Watch video of Schlafly's interview, embedded below via YouTube:

[image of Phyllis Schlafly via Gage Skidmore's Flickr Photostream, Creative Commons licensed]

[hat-tip to Mediaite]