Via the New York Daily News, Blue Texan of Firedoglake has learned what the platform writers of the Texas Republican Party think is vitally important:
The GOP there has voted on a platform that would ban oral and anal sex. It also would give jail sentences to anyone who issues a marriage license to a same-sex couple (even though such licenses are already invalid in the state)....
In addition, the platform says that homosexuality "tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit and leads to the spread of dangerous communicable diseases."
Texas Republicans also want to ban strip clubs and “all pornography."
Oh, but there's way more to their platform than that. As Raw Story reported a few days ago (hat tip: Zandar):
In addition to this, the Texas GOP seeks to end the state's lottery, which provides millions in funding to public education; restrict citizenship to children born in the United States whose parents are citizens; end federal sponsorship of pre-kindergarten schools; impose a jail sentence on any illegal immigrant in the state; shut down all day-labor centers; cut off all bilingual education after a student's fourth year in a U.S. public school; legalize corporal punishment in public schools; mandate that evolution and global warming be "taught as challengeable scientific theory"; and demand that Congress evict the United Nations from U.S. soil and end American membership in the global body.
You can read the whole thing for yourself (PDF). My favorite plank?
Livestock and Pet Locations – We oppose a mandatory national animal identification system requiring registration of all animals, of animal owners and their properties, including GPS coordinates and the use of RFID technology.
A burning issue, no doubt.
Notice the resemblance between this and the recent Texas textbook standards? Those didn't amount to a curriculum so much as a loose collection of talk-radio-fueled right-wing resentments; this platform is pretty much the same.
Then again, things are looking up in some ways -- a few years back, Kevin Drum gathered together a list of planks in the 2000 Texas GOP platform. You should really read his list in its entirety, but notice three planks that are gone from the current document:
* "The Party calls for the United States monetary system to be returned to the gold standard."
* "The Party believes the minimum wage law should be repealed."
* "The Party urges Congress to support HJR 77, the Panama and America Security Act, which declare the Carter-Torrijos Treaty null and void. We support re-establishing United States control over the Canal...."
Total impact of that extremist document on the national electability of Texas Republican George W. Bush? As far as I can tell, zero.
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UPDATE: My mistake -- the current platform does call for the repeal of minimum wage laws. Yet more highlights here.
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