El Paso Police Arrest One Man In Connection To Anti-Gay Hate Crime As Investigation Continues, New Poll Reveals Slim Majority Do Not Support Proposed Constitutional Amendment Banning Same Sex Marriage In North Carolina, Democrat Super Political Action Committee Attacks Mitt Romney In South Carolina On Basis Of Past Support Of Gay Rights, Evangelical Conservative Announce Support For Rick Santorum, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jared Padalecki

An update on a previous post, El Paso, Texas police have arrested a 26-year-old man in connection with the robbery and beating of a gay man on Sunday. Fernando Pacheco Martinez, who faces a robbery charge, is the first arrest made in connection with the beating, which is being investigated as a hate crime. Police said more arrests are pending. According to The El Paso Times, police said Martinez and another person confronted Emilio Moreno, 23, in an alley in the 3800 block of Fort in Central El Paso and began kicking and punching Moreno, who sustained visible injuries, including a broken nose. Martinez and the other suspect then took items belonging to Moreno while making "comments related to sexual preference," police said. On Thursday, Martinez was booked into the El Paso County Jail on a $75,000 bond. Police continue to investigate.

Some North Carolinians are beginning to have doubts about the state’s proposed amendment to ban same-sex marriage, according to a poll. The Fayetteville Observer reports that Public Policy Polling, a Democratic pollster based in Raleigh, said 56-percent of voters surveyed in January support amending the state constitution to ban same sex marriages. In October, support for the amendment stood at 61-percent. The support has continued to trickle downward since then, the pollster said this week. Tom Jensen, director of the polling firm, said the decrease in support for the amendment may reflect voters in the state “becoming more aware about just how far reaching it would be,” according to a news release. “There are a lot of voters who are fine with civil unions but not with gay marriage who are planning right now to vote for the amendment, not realizing that it would ban civil unions, too,” Jensen said. In the poll (available at the source), 32-percent said gay couples should be allowed to form civil unions but not marry. The GOP-led legislature voted last year to hold the state-wide vote on the issue. The vote is scheduled for the state’s May primary. Activists on both sides are expected to spend millions of dollars this year on the issue. If approved by voters, the state constitution would be amended to provide that marriage between one man and one woman be the only domestic legal union valid in the state. Only 34-percent in the latest Public Policy Polling survey said they would vote against the amendment. The pollster surveyed 780 North Carolina registered voters January 5-8. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

If a Democratic-allied super Political Action Committee has its way, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s past statements on gay rights issues will come back to haunt him in South Carolina this week. ABC News reports that the group, American Bridge 21st Century, has produced an anti-Romney flyer designed to expose a series of Romney’s more sympathetic comments about the gay and lesbian community. “We thought you’d like to see how much common ground there is between Mitt Romney and some of the great voices of the LGBT rights movement,” the top of the flyer reads. What follows are four Romney quotes paired with similar comments by gay rights leaders Harvey Milk, Audre Lorde, Lt. Dan Choi and the gay Massachusetts congressman, Barney Frank. “The gay community needs more support from the Republican Party,” reads one of Romney’s quotes on the flyer, which is printed on pink paper. The group began distributing the fliers on car windshields in Charleston, S.C. on Saturday outside a Fox News forum with all of the presidential candidates moderated by Mike Huckabee and South Carolina Congressman Tim Scott. They plan to continue handing them out all week long at selected venues throughout the state, including in church parking lots on Sunday morning. American Bridge’s goal is to chip away at Romney’s support among conservative voters in the state, especially evangelical Christians. “This isn’t about painting Romney as a liberal to voters in South Carolina,” the group’s president, Rodell Mollineau, said in an interview with ABC News, “it really is about showing voters that this man has no core and he will say anything to get elected.” Mollineau’s group, which has dispatched trackers to follow the GOP candidates over the course of the primary season, plans other attacks on Romney this week ahead of the state’s Jan. 21 primary. American Bridge will use video, social media and possibly newspaper ads to exploit what they see as the former Massachusetts governor’s vulnerabilities in at least two other areas: his position on abortion and his evolution as a conservative. The hand-outs are meant to mirror fliers that were reportedly distributed by Romney during his 2002 gubernatorial campaign in Massachusetts that included a statement by Romney and his running mate, Kerry Healy, that read: “All citizens deserve equal rights regardless of their sexual preference.” Romney campaign strategist Eric Fehrnstrom, who served as communications director for the candidate’s 2002 bid, recently told the Huffington Post that he never saw or approved the decade-old fliers.

Meanwhile, after months of debate, social conservative leaders finally gave collective voice Saturday to their unhappiness that Mitt Romney might be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. If not quite a stop-Romney movement, the decision to try to rally support for Rick Santorum represents an open expression of their frustrations. According to The Washington Post, conservatives opposed to Romney have just six days to slow his march toward victory. If the former Massachusetts governor wins the South Carolina primary next Saturday, his opponents will have virtually no way to deny him the nomination. He could still become the nominee even if he loses next week, but a defeat would raise the stakes considerably in Florida, which votes January 31. It’s possible that the decision to embrace Santorum, announced by social conservative leaders Saturday, may have come too late to be truly effective. Because of that, there are a host of questions about the impact of the consensus that emerged around the former Pennsylvania senator’s candidacy during a meeting in Texas this weekend. Will the groups represented at the gathering take material steps to help Santorum? Will Santorum’s campaign see an infusion of money, volunteers and grass-roots activity? How will the other conservatives who have been trying to become the Romney alternative — former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry — respond? Will they now try to go after Santorum, even as they work to deny Romney a victory? How will those in the movement who backed either Perry or Gingrich respond? Finally, will this have any impact on Ron Paul, a candidate with a real following and the wherewithal to keep going, despite the fact that many in the party want to ignore him? Santorum could have used this new support weeks ago, as he was beginning his rise in Iowa and before Romney developed a head of steam. Had it come then, he probably would have won the Iowa caucuses, possibly changing the complexion of the race. He might have been able to pour more money into South Carolina earlier and buttress against what always was likely to be a poor showing in New Hampshire. Coming the weekend before the most crucial contest so far in the GOP nomination battle, the embrace of Santorum is helpful but at this point far from a decisive boost. More than anything, the rebellion by social conservative leaders speaks to the mismatch between Romney and the base of the party he seeks to lead. Throughout this campaign, the lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy among the party’s conservative base has been a powerful undercurrent but little more than that. Romney is not the ideal candidate for social and religious conservatives — or for the new force within the party, the tea party movement. That’s hardly news, however. Saturday’s announcement in Texas adds to tensions between the party establishment, to the extent it exists, and its grass-roots conservative activists. Romney’s 2008 candidacy foundered on questions of whether he was authentically conservative and whether his changes in position on abortion and other issues were genuine or just politically motivated. He claims now that he campaigned that year as one of the conservative alternatives to Sen. John McCain (Arizona), but the real conservative challenger in that race was former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

Jake Gyllenhaal has lost his beard; literally.

Supernatural’s sexy Jared Padalecki spotted arriving in Vancouver, British Columbia.