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Homosexuality and the Texas GOP’s 2010 Party Platform
Justin Randall, JGRJ Note & Comment Editor 2010-11
This week, the Texas Republican Party released their 2010 State Party Platform. This document outlined the official party position on a number of policy issues, including same-sex marriage, homosexuality and the former Texas sodomy statutes. In this platform, the Texas GOP ignores the separation of church and state as well as recent Supreme Court decisions instead choosing to focus on a platform of discrimination and oppression.
In their publication, the Texas Republican Party propagates hate against LGBT Texans by supporting a definition of marriage as a “God-ordained, legal and moral commitment only between a man and a woman.” To protect this sanctified union, the Texas GOP suggests creating a law that makes anyone who issues a marriage license to same-sex couples guilty of a felony. At the same time, the party strongly demands that Congress remove jurisdiction from the federal courts over sodomy cases, in an attempt to re-criminalize sodomy to discriminate and imprison LGBT Texans.
The Texas Republican Party does not stop there. Instead, the 2010 Party Platform includes an entire paragraph on the party’s opposition to homosexuality. The statement is reproduced below:
We believe that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans. Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle in our public education and policy, nor should “family” be redefined to include homosexual “couples.”
This statement would make even Texas’s own George W. Bush cringe. It propagates open and flagrant political discrimination that contradicts equal protection of all citizens before the laws of the United States. The Texas GOP is hoping to go back to the good ol’ days…when segregation and discrimination was a legally accepted practice. Unfortunately for Texas Republicans, the Supreme Court interprets the legality of state laws, keeping overzealous discrimination from becoming adopted law. The people of Texas should do the same and vote some sense into their Republican Party, or maybe it is time to truly let Governor Rick Perry get what he wants most in life: Texas’ secession from the United States.
