This weekend, Texas Republicans passed what is perhaps the most restrictive, reactionary, bigoted party platform of the past half century. The platform, adopted on the closing day of the Texas GOP state convention, offers an array of deeply homophobic, transphobic, pro-gun, anti-democracy planks, including declaring homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle” and insisting that President Biden was “not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”
The platform and its planks, voted on by more than 5,000 Texas GOP delegates and alternates, could be easily dismissed as a far-right fluke, animated by a handful of party die-hards more focused on enshrining their state’s “right to secede from the United States” than actually meeting the needs of their fellow Texans. Everything is bigger in Texas, right? But writing off this unambiguous lurch into enshrined Christian nationalism (there’s even an entire section dedicated to “religious freedom” that focuses exclusively on Christianity) is to miss the forest for the trees. The Texas GOP platform, extreme as it is, is not some aberration to be shrugged off as merely Texans doing Texas Texan-ly. Instead, it’s best to think of the platform and its newest planks as both the inevitable outcome of America’s longstanding — if recently accelerated — right-wing enterprise of exclusion and repression, as well as a template for what’s yet to come.
