Required Reading: Texas Republican Party Platform, 2010

Has anyone read the Texas Republican Party’s Platform lately?  If you haven’t, you should. Everyone who lives in Texas should be concerned about the wide range of planks in this document, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll concentrate on what’s specifically directed at the LGBT community.

To get a clear picture of the Platform’s message to the LGBT community, take a look at “Celebrating Traditional Marriage” where the document states, “We believe that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases…” families should not be “redefined to include homosexual “couples.”

Some of the other ‘low lights’ in their Platform call for making it a felony to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and denying homosexual partner insurance or retirement benefits. To cap this, anyone who “opposes homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values” would do so with impunity.

As citizens of America and residents of the State of Texas, ask yourself a few questions:  What does a “platform” mean? Is it the place where voters are told what the party stands for? Do you stand by your platform? Do you believe in it enough to stand UP for it? If what’s written in this document are the values of the Republican Party, then those of us who believe in equality for all families need to stand up and say very loudly, “These are not our values. These beliefs discriminate against people we love and children we hold dear. These beliefs discriminate against humanity.”

If we want to be active about standing up for  our values, we should call on our Republican friends to disavow the parts of their Platform that are blatantly discriminatory, and ask them to vow to change it the next time around. Real Texans believe families come in many shapes and sizes. Real Texans believe in equal rights for all citizens regardless of who you love, and that equality denied to one human being affects you, me and everybody around us.  Real families are based on love, not on discrimination.