The 2014 Texas Republican Platform - Follow-Up
I'd originally posted my entry on the latest Texas GOP platform based on a draft version of the platform. Now that the official platform has been released, I went and updated a few of the quotes to match the final version, and tweaked a bit of my own commentary. If you want to read this updated version, you can find it at the same place as before, The 2014 Texas Republican Platform.
To add a bit more to this post to make it somewhat worthwhile, I did some word counts on the platform to see how often religious themes came up, since it seemed like quite a bit when I was reading it. The count was nothing fancy - just typing a word into the search box in Adobe Reader and counting how many times Adobe found it. And for comparison, I did the same thing with the Democratic Party platform. Below is the table of how often each term appeared. For reference, there are 37-38 pages of content in the Republican platform (depending on if you consolidate the pages that were only half full), and 61 pages of content in the Democratic platform.
# Appearances of Terms in Party Platforms | ||
Term | Republican | Democratic |
judeo-christian | 4 | 0 |
christian | 5 | 0 |
faith | 7 | 2* |
faith based | 5 | 1 |
god | 12 | 1 |
bible | 3 | 0 |
church | 4 | 2 |
religious | 19 | 9 |
religion | 2 | 8 |
For the Republicans, that's an awful lot of religion squeezed into a political party's platform for what's supposed to be a secular government with separation of church and state. The Democratic Party platform has much less overtly religious language, which is an even starker contrast considering their platform is 1.7 times longer. And the context was different, as well. The Democrats mostly wanted to protect religious freedom, while keeping government and religion separate. The vast majority of the references in the Democratic platform were in the section, 'Religious Freedom', where you'd expect them to be, not interspersed throughout the platform in unrelated sections like foreign policy.
I've come across a few good articles from other sources addressing this platform. They're much shorter that what I wrote, which is probably a good thing since they're the right length to keep people interested. Having reviewed the platform myself, I can say that the selection of planks in those articles isn't cherry picking, but representative of the overall craziness and extremism. So, if you think my post is overwhelmingly long, or you want to see what other people have to say, here are the links. The first one from the New Yorker is my favorite.
- The New Yorker - In Fever Dreams Begin Irresponsibilities, Texas Edition
- Think Progress - 16 Wacky Ideas In The Texas Republican Party's New Platform
- Texas Tribune - GOP Approves Hardline Immigration Stance in Party Platform
- Reuters - Texas Republicans adopt hard-line on immigration, gay rights
- RH Reality Check - Texas Republicans' New Anti-Gay, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Abortion Platform
Updated 2014-07-18: Added the Democratic Party column to the table and the related commentary.