The History Of The Texas Rearrangers

The Texas GOP has voted to go all on in the anti gay bigotry, adopting the re-criminalization of sodomy and same-sex marriage as felonies as part of the state Republican party's official platform.

Texas Republicans are a conservative lot. Still, it's difficult to imagine mainstream GOP voters demanding their neighbors be jailed for engaging in a little hanky-panky behind closed doors.

Nevertheless, the state's Republican party has voted on a platform [PDF link] by which their candidates will stand, and it includes the reinstatement of laws banning sodomy: otherwise known as oral and anal sex.

The party's platform also seeks to make gay marriage a felony offense, which may be confusing to most given that the state does not sanction or recognize same sex marriages, meaning any such ceremony conducted does not bear the weight of law. Whether this means the GOP wants gay couples married in other states to be pursued through Texas as dangerous criminals, the party did not specify.

"We oppose the legalization of sodomy," the platform states. "We demand that Congress exercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy."

There's what Republicans want to do when they get back into power:  Round up gays and lesbians (and anyone having oral sex for that matter) as felons, or heck even go after people with same-sex marriages in other states.  This is their plan for solving ten percent unemployment, two wars, finding Bin Laden, the oil spill, etc.  Round up the gays and throw 'em in jail!

Folks, this is not the position of a few fringe members of the party.  This is now an officially adopted, mainstream platform plank of all Texas Republicans.

Oh, and PS, they want to do all this too:

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.

This lunacy is now the mainstream Texas Republican platform, folks. Rounding up all gays and illegal immigrants, end the 14th Amendment, end the United Nations, end evolution, and more.  Their reaction to the elections of 2006 and 2008 have been to go completely insane and try to turn the country into a fundamentalist theocracy.  And Republicans in state after state are adopting similar platform planks.  They are becoming the reactionary purity party, and it should scare the hell out of everyone.