Republican Platform Rejects Paris Climate Agreement
Republican Platform Rejects Paris Climate Agreement
GOP platform, which calls coal ‘clean’, would reverse decades of U.S. energy and climate policy
GOP platform, which calls coal ‘clean’, would reverse decades of U.S. energy and climate policy
The Platforms Are A Window Into The Future Of The Parties
The Platforms Are A Window Into The Future Of The Parties
The Most Extreme Republican Platform in Memory
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/opinion/the-most-extreme-republican-platform-in-memory.html
For all the disruption and damage that Donald Trump has meant for Republicans, the party’s
statement of its views in its newly written convention platform rivals him for shock value. Platforms are traditionally written by and for the party faithful and largely ignored by everyone else. But this year, the Republicans are putting out an agenda that demands notice.
It is as though, rather than trying to reconcile Mr. Trump’s heretical views with conservative orthodoxy, the writers of the platform simply opted to go with the most extreme version of every position. Tailored to Mr. Trump’s impulsive bluster, this document lays bare just how much the G.O.P. is driven by a regressive, extremist inner core.
Mr. Trump’s anti-Muslim phobia and fantasy wall across the Mexican border are front and center, along with his protectionist views, which deny long-held positions of the party. No less alarming is a raft of planks that ideologues pushed through to banish any notion of moderation and present-day reality from the party’s credo.
This majority has triumphed in securing retrograde positions that include making no exceptions for rape or women’s health in cases of abortion; requiring the Bible to be taught in public high schools; selling coal as a “clean” energy source; demanding a return of federal lands to the states; insisting that legislators use religion as a guide in lawmaking; appointing “family values” judges; barring female soldiers from combat; and rejecting the need for stronger gun controls — despite the mass shootings afflicting the nation every week.
The platform also makes homophobia and the denial of basic civil rights to gays, lesbians and transgender people a centerpiece. It repudiates same-sex marriage, despite strong support for this constitutional right in the nation at large. The party invokes “natural marriage” and states’ rights for determining which bathrooms transgender people may use, and it defends merchants who would deny service to gay customers.
Optimists who show up every four years as members of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay rights group,
had to admit this was “the most anti-L.G.B.T. platform in the party’s 162-year history.”
It is hard to believe the Republicans’ platform came just three years after party leaders, stunned by the drubbing they took in President Obama’s re-election, commissioned what came to be called a G.O.P. autopsy. It candidly admitted that polls showed the party was harmed by a public perception that “the G.O.P. does not care about people.” Young voters “are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents,” the report warned, while “many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”
Enter Mr. Trump, and three years later his dangerous nativism has turned that post-2012 warning into a terrible prophecy. Party officials who once spoke of the need for immigration reform have been silenced. The planks of 2016 have been fashioned as underpinnings for Trump jingoism.
The G.O.P. used to insist it was the “big tent” open to one and all. Now it’s the “big wall” party braced by a destructive platform out of touch with American lives and devoid of the common sense the nation needs for any form of political progress.
