Will Stone - KJZZ News

Advocacy groups gathered at the Trans Queer Pueblo in Phoenix to press Arizona's Latino community to voice support for LGBTQ+ people of color.

(Photo by Will Stone - KJZZ)

A memorial for the victims of the Orlando massacre on Sunday.

Progressive advocacy groups are calling on Arizona’s Latino community to rally around lesbian, gay, bisexual,transgender and queer people of color following the mass shooting in Orlando.

On Thursday, a handful of community-based organizations, including Puente Arizona, Trans Queer Pueblo, Equality Arizona, the American Civil Liberties Union, gathered to sign a document “affirming” their shared values of “Love, Roots, Solidarity, Liberation and Family.”

“Our LGBTQ+ people of color community, especially transwomen, face violence and discrimination every day,” Dagoberto Bailón said, who’s with  Trans Queer Pueblo, which hosted the event.

“We will move forward from the massacre of Orlando to build a coalition and community toward social justice and an unapologetic celebration of queerness, transness and women,” he said.

While the ceremony had symbolic meaning, it also carried a specific political message. Last month, Arizona faith and business leaders, calling themselves the Family Values Group, signed a "Declaration of Values” that spells out the religious, moral and social tenets of what it calls the traditional Hispanic family.

The two-page document accuses the Spanish mass media of promoting “new and false models for marriage, the family and other God-given realities.” The declaration also rejects “every attempt to promote abortion as a morally acceptable option for our community” and “every attempt to redefine the concept of marriage…Two fathers will never replace a mother.”

Representatives from the Catholic and LDS Churches, as well as Evangelical pastors are among those who supported the document.

“[They] are really spreading a message of hate toward LGBT people and women,” Dulce Juarez, with the American Civil Liberties Union, said.

“We are a community that’s Latino and people of color that stand for the rights of LGBT people, and this comes at a crucial time more than ever we need to be making that statement,” she said.

A call to the author of the "Declaration of Values" was not immediatly returned.