A document for the (middle) ages:
Platform of the Texas Republican Party
By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2010
The Texas Republican Party held its convention a couple of weeks ago in Dallas. To say the Texas branch of the Republican Party is right wing is a vast understatement. They make Attila the Hun seem like a bleeding-heart liberal. It’ll probably give you some idea of where they stand to know that one of the main speakers at their kick off dinner was Rep. Michele Bachmann, the extremist right-winger from Minnesota.
But to really get the feel of how extreme the Texas Republicans are, one needs to read the Texas Republican Platform. Here are just a few of the things in that platform that these Republicans would like to see (and the comments in parentheses are mine):
- Want deep-water drilling to continue in the Gulf of Mexico and other places. (A crazy notion in the midst of the current oil disaster, and one that is at odds with the majority of Americans.)
- Want to abolish the Energy Department. (Makes no sense in light of global climate change and our need to find and develop alternate energy sources.)
- Want to abolish the Education Department. (This would give fundamentalist-controlled local school boards even more power — creationism anyone?)
- Want to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and institute a national sales tax. (To protect the rich and put a greater percentage of the tax burden on the poor, working and middle classes.)
- Want to withdraw this country from the United Nations. (With a military budget like the U.S. has, who needs diplomacy?)
- Oppose the establishment of time frames for withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan. (Because eternal war is good for business and the dead soldiers are mainly poor, working class or minority.)
- Support the “democratically-elected” governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. (They may be corrupt puppets, but they are our corrupt puppets.)
- Want to abolish Affirmative Action. (Because the white power structure must be maintained.)
- Want to eliminate the Endangered Species Act. (Our grandkids wouldn’t want to have those animals around taking up space that can be used by Big Business.)
- Want to outlaw driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. (Will we be safer if all these drivers are unlicensed and uninsured?)
- Want to let religious organizations engage in politics without fear of losing their tax-exempt status and want to eliminate the separation of church and state. (Because a theocracy is much better than a democracy.)
- Want to eliminate the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. (Because businesses should be able to discriminate against anyone they want.)
- Want to abolish Supreme Court jurisdiction in abortion, religious issues, and the Bill of Rights. (Because rights are only for white Christian males.)
- Want to require a presidential candidate to submit a birth certificate before they can be placed on the state’s ballot. (The “birthers” are alive and well — and Republican.)
- Want English adopted as the official language. (Even though Spanish was spoken for hundreds of years in Texas before English was.)
- Want to abolish “no-fault divorce” laws. (Because it should be difficult for a person to get out of an abusive marriage.)
- Want to ensure marriage can only be between a “natural man and a natural woman.” (Because equal rights shouldn’t apply to all citizens.)
- Want to re-institute sodomy laws and deny the Supreme Court the right to review the law. (In spite of the fact that both of these would be unconstitutional.)
- Want to make it a felony crime to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple. (If they have to force discrimination they are willing to do it.)
- Want all human life respected from fertilization to natural death. (A fancy way of saying a woman should not have the right to control over her own body.)
- Support the death penalty and want to extend it to rape cases. (What happened to respect for human life until natural death?)
- Want to outlaw the sale and use of RU-486 and any other “morning-after pills.” (But you can bet they’ll oppose the government taking care of the unwanted babies this would cause.)
- Want to eliminate social security and the social security tax and transition to “private pensions.” (Because retirement should only be for those who can afford it — not poor or working class folks.)
- Want to “defund, repeal and reject” the health care act passed by U.S. Congress and signed by President Obama. (Because health care is a privilege for the rich — not a right for everyone.)
- Oppose government mandating the vaccination of children. (Because a plague every now and then is a good thing.)
- Oppose pre-school, kindergarten and any government programs dealing with early childhood development. (Wouldn’t want kids to actually be ready for school or they might learn to think for themselves.)
- Support “open carry” laws and oppose “Gun Free Zones.” (Because everyone should always be armed, especially in schools, bars, churches, and courthouses.)
- Support the formation of an armed state militia. (Because you just can’t have too many nuts carrying guns.)
- Want the Minimum Wage Law to be repealed. (Because workers and families don’t really need to have a decent standard of living.)
- Oppose the Fourteenth Amendment which gives citizenship to anyone born in the U.S. (Especially brown people who may soon make whites a minority.)
- Oppose a Palestinian state being carved out of “historical Israel.” (Because that would lead to a two-state solution and peace in the Middle East).
These are just a few of the nutty ideas proposed in the Texas Republican platform. Does this sound like the kind of America you want to live in and leave for your children? I urge you to go read this very scary document in its entirety. The America these people want to create would be a terrible place for anyone not white, male, and rich.
The Republicans don’t just want a return to the 1950s — they want to go all the way back to the 1850s. Is there any remaining doubt that the Republican Party in Texas has been taken over by right-wing extremist fringe elements?
[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]
So why bad-mouth Attila? He was pretty cool; carved-out a big empire.
In the end he failed to effectively administrate the lives of the conquered.
He did trash a lot of stuff though; and so it seems, had fun doing that!
mps
Vlad the Impaler had a “working Theocracy” that was technically Christian.
Of course, then as now, the Christian Only State Doctrine excluded a lot of “other” Christians, just for a start, and also Jewish people, which wouldn’t fit very well with the support for only one faction of Jewish People within Israel who didn’t even get a third of the popular vote in their last election.
Maybe Rick Goodhair can figure out a way to eat oil. Perhaps he and his Oil Company Masters errr… oops, “Advisors” and (now unlimited, thanks to the Supreme Court he hates so much) donors to his freakish cause, should start working on recipes for making oil nutritious. They can start experimenting on themselves at any time, lead the way so to speak.
More worrisome than Creationism is the notion that there actually ARE races of man, even though that has been roundly disproved, the idea that Noah, the most righteous man who ever lived, got drunk and cursed his son, thus the Darker Races are inferior to the Caucasian “race” and supposed to remain in abject servitude to them. Dismiss as Hippie Historic Revisionism the notion that Texas seceded from the Union in defense of Slavery rather than States Rights… The state’s rights to use State Funds and State Police powers to perpetually deny liberty to Human Beings from before their birth simply because they were constitutionally designated as Property and to allow them the basic rights accorded to the Privileged Race, that would be depriving their “owners” of property without due process.
The “Original Intent” of the arbitrarily designated “founding fathers’ is supposed to be taught as Absolute Dogma, except for when it would get noticed that there never was a majority consensus on any issue the “Founding Fathers” had to face. It’s why the “Founding Fathers” rich white men who wrote the Constitution refused to include the Bill of Rights in the original Constitution, That’s why they’re called “Amendments”.
Which would also contradict their notion that the Constitutional provisions for Amending the Constitution should be abolished, in favor of the Original Intent, non-unanimous though it was.
Aren’t Republican Wacka-doodle-dandies so very entertaining? For any of y’all Yankees and other non-Texans in the world reading this, I’m from Texas too, and contrary to their own self-inflated beliefs, the Right Wing don’t speak for ALL Texans and most of the time, not even for the majority. Not everybody from or in Texas is ignorant. It just helps to remember that from time to time.
Vlad, had an anti-Turk thing that got really out of hand.A psychopathic
warrior like Atilla!
Does this sound like the kind of America you want to live in and leave for your children?
Yes!
I know it’s fun to play Us & Them, but I don’t think it’s particularly helpful. Yes, you can easily say there are some nutty things, but there are also a number of pieces in there with which I expect a lot of people privy to this blog resonate.
For example, opposition to the patriot acts, to executive orders, Real ID/RFID, emergency war powers/state of emergency.. That’s just in the first section.
It’s easy to find differences and so strengthen group identities, but I think our best bet is to get down to the deeper human commonalities. If we can really acknowledge that we genuinely want the same things — focusing first on the ends in broad terms (Happiness, Health, Freedom) rather than the itemized means (abolishing affirmative action or what-have-you) — then our chances for working together to plot out a realistic and authentic path to those ends are much more hopeful.
What do you think?