Alex Altman’s piece on Newt Gingrich’s troubled relationship with Evangelical Christian voters in Iowa offers two quotes from the FAMiLY Leader’s Bob Vander Plaats, which suggest that the anti-gay “family values” organization is willing to overlook the former speaker’s multiple marriages and past infidelities to back a winner who is not Mitt Romney:

“He is articulating a very Christian-historical worldview. People are seeing he’s had a life transformation,” Vander Plaats says of Gingrich. “The second thing he’s got going for him is some people believe Newt is the best prepared to lead. And three is that he looks like the one with the best shot at being the alternative to Romney and defeating Romney. Believe me, conservatives want an alternative to Romney. They don’t trust him.” [...]

“Rock-solid Christians are giving him the benefit of the doubt,” Vander Plaats says. “The thing that’s going for him is we live in such an environment today, where the world dynamics as so uncertain, and Washington is so broken, that some people believe Newt is the best prepared by far to take on an environment like this.”

Vander Plaats — who ran Mike Huckabee’s Iowa operation in 2008 — hasn’t made an official endorsement yet, but has indicated that he is open to tweaking the group’s so-called marriage fidelity pledge to accommodate Gingrich’s demands (whatever those may be). Gingrich too has returned the favor. Last year, Gingrich offered his vocal support for Vander Plaats’ successful campaign to oust three of the nine Iowa Supreme Court justices who had unanimously ruled in favor of marriage equality and his associates bankrolled more than one-third of the $850,000 campaign to remove the justices.

New analysis has been released from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey that shows the compounding effect of bias and discrimination against Latino/a transgender people. The “devastating” effect of anti-trans bias and institutional bias has severe consequences for this community in housing, health care, education, employment, and overall quality of life. Here are some highlights from the new analysis:

• 28 percent of Latino/a transgender people live in extreme poverty, with an income of less than $10,000/year.
• Latino/a transgender people face incredibly high rates of HIV infection, with 8.44 percent reporting they are HIV-positive and an additional 10.23 percent reporting they did not know their status. The chart at right shows how disproportionate these rates are.
• 47 percent of Latino/a respondents reported having attempted suicide.
• 77 percent of Latino/a respondents attending school reported experience harassment, and 21 percent had to leave their schools because it was so severe.
• When the unemployment rate for the general public was 7 percent, it was 20 percent for Latino/a transgender people.
• 23 percent of Latino/a transgender people reported being refused medical care due to bias.

Read the full report in English or Spanish for more information. Today’s report is a product of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the National Center for Transgender Equality, and the League of United Latin American Citizens. The Task Force previously released a report examining the experience of people who are black/African-American and transgender.

The Puerto Rican Senate recently approved a bill that “could eliminate LGBT-specific categories from the island’s hate crimes law” and now the House is expected to take up the measure, the blog Boy In Bushwick is reporting:

The Puerto Rico Senate late last month approved a provision that would eliminate sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, ethnicity and religion from the current statute—political status, age and disability would remain. The House of Representatives is expected to vote on the amended penal code during a special legislative session.

Representative Héctor Ferrer, Sen. Eduardo Bhatia and LGBT and Dominican activists blasted the proposed provisions earlier on Sunday, Dec. 4. “It’s an outrage and now we’re calling upon the House to restore this to where it should be,” said Pedro Julio Serrano of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

The island enacted hate crimes legislation in 2002, covering crimes based on sexual orientation or gender identity, but activists say that authorities are ignoring the measure. Justice Secretary Guillermo Somoza said his office’s special task force on hate crimes found there “have been 23 murders of gays and transgender people since the fall of 2009,” an underestimate given that the police often fail to classify anti-LGBT hate crimes as such. Under the measure, if someone “is found guilty of a hate crime they automatically face the maximum sentence for the underlying offense. If the offense is murder, it means life in prison.”

Rick Santorum joined the social conservative pile-on against current Republican presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich on Sunday, telling ABC’s This Week with Christine Amanpour that the former House speaker has pushed social issues to “the back of the bus“:

AMANPOUR: Is he a real conservative with the social values that…

SANTORUM: I think Newt has consistently put those in the back of the bus. He has never really been an advocate of pushing those issues. Newt is someone who likes to get issues that are 80 to 90 percent of the polls. And 80 percent of the polls are generally not necessarily conservative, strong conservative issues. But that’s how Newt has always tried to govern. And I respect that, that’s certainly a way to do so. I tend to take the position that it’s important to lead with what you believe is right for America and try to bring the American public along instead of trying to find where everybody is and then try to do that.

Watch it:

Indeed both Santorum and Bachmann — who round out the bottom of the pack in a recent poll from the Des Moines Register — have attacked Gingrich on his commitment to conservative social issues like abortion in their bids to court social conservatives ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3. Leaders of Iowa’s Evangelical community have yet to unite behind a single candidate and remain split over Gingrich’s candidacy. While the FAMiLY Leader seems poised to endorse him, an Iowa group calling itself Iowans for Christian Leaders in Government has released an ad targeting Gingrich for his multiple marriages and extramarital affairs.

Gingrich’s record on social issues does betray a more moderate streak. In 1998, for instance, Gingrich called “for tolerance of candidates who support partial-birth abortion, saying he would campaign for them: ‘It’s the voters of America who have a right — in some places they’re going to pick people who are to my right, some places they’re going to pick people who are to my left and in both cases, if they’re the Republican nominee, I am going to actively campaign for them.’”