One committee member, a Baptist Deacon named Hardy Billington, took out a newspaper ad four years ago that claimed homosexuality is “killing people 2 to 3 times the rate of smoking”. The document will form the basis of discussions for the panel, which will meet this week to adapt the language and vote on a final proposal, which will then go before the full convention next week.
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Matt McTighe, executive director of Freedom for All Americans, condemned the platform and said presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump should seek to remove the anti-LGBT language.
Their immobility on these issues exposes a large rift with most Americans, who favor greater LGBT rights than Republicans are willing to accept.
There’s no way to sugar-coat this: I’m mad as hell – and I know you are, too. If the party wants a future, it should be mindful of those statistics and evolve, she said.
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, a co-chair of the committee, said the vote was a reaffirmation of the GOP’s longtime position on marriage, but said that did not mean the party was shutting out gay and lesbian members like Hoff.
She said it was especially damaging the party with young people to be fighting so stridently to maintain what she called “very hurtful, very mean-spirited” language including declaring families without a married mother and father to be damaging to society and to children. But that wasn’t the LGBT advocates’ last stand. They also proposed that the LGBT community should be pointedly added to the description condemning the attacks at an Orlando nightclub last month where 49 people at a gay club were killed.
Teach the Bible as literature: The committee labored for a long time on Monday over whether to encourage public schools to teach the Bible as a literature elective.
While GOP platforms in the past have highlighted heightening border security and taking a tougher stance on undocumented immigrants, the party has never before gone so far as to call for a border wall.
Platform language also says free trade agreements have cost the nation manufacturing jobs and says the government needs to crack down on partners who violate trade laws, other themes Trump has championed on the campaign trail. Trump has been hesitant to fully embrace socially conservative positions on abortion, gay unions and transgender rights, once telling Bruce Jenner (now known as Caitlyn) that he can use any bathroom in Trump Tower he likes. “We salute the several states which have filed suit against it”, reads the platform.
The platform is also reinforcing studies showing same-sex parenting harms children.
Annie Dickerson, a Republican delegate from NY, said the change relied upon “outrageous, awful evidence” and represented “another poke in the eye to the gay community”.
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“Stop repelling gays, for God’s sake!” she insisted. In 2012, 60 percent of Republicans were opposed to same-sex marriage, but that figure is down to 52 percent today.
