GOP Platform: Soft on Gay Marriage, Savage on Trans Rights
The Republican Party's official 2024 platform no longer explicitly opposes same-sex marriage but harshly opposes transgender rights.
GOP delegates adopted a convention platform ahead of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The new platform, at the behest of former President Donald Trump, walks back some of the previous platform’s harsher language on issues like reproductive rights and same-sex marriage.
Trump advisers said they wanted the platform to more closely reflect the former president’s stances on various issues.
“This is something hopefully you will pass,” Trump reportedly told delegates when he called into a meeting of delegates last week, as reported by The Washington Post. “You will pass it quickly, and we will show unity in our party as opposed to the disaster that is going on with the Democrats.
“We are going to win because we have right on our side,” Trump added, according to people present at the meeting, who spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity. “We have good on our side. I think, frankly, we have God on our side. These people are opposed to religion.”
The GOP’s 2016 platform, which was re-adopted in 2020 without debate amid the Covid-19 pandemic, explicitly called for a constitutional amendment to affirm the due process rights of embryos and fetuses, as well as a national law banning abortion — with some exceptions — after 20 weeks of gestation.
It also explicitly condemned the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges overturning state-level bans on same-sex marriage.
By contrast, the 2024 platform aligns with Trump’s stated position — adopted in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark case guaranteeing a right to terminate a pregnancy — that each state be granted the freedom to come up with its own regulations regarding abortion.
The platform opposes late-term abortion, but encourages states to adopt “policies that advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”
The platform takes no particular position on same-sex marriage — which gay conservatives are already touting as a victory and “proof” that Trump is supportive of gay rights.
However, the platform does not address a lack of federal nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people in housing, education, health care, or lending.
It also fails to mention the prevalence of so-called “religious freedom” or “conscience clause exemption” laws allowing businesses, state government agencies, and child placement agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people and same-sex couples, among other groups.
However, the revised GOP platform takes especially harsh stances on transgender rights and visibility.
While it does not explicitly ban parents from seeking out gender-affirming medical treatments for their children, it condemns taxpayer funding for all types of gender-affirming care, especially surgical interventions.
It also explicitly opposes any recognition of a person’s gender identity as valid.
“We will keep men out of women’s sports, ban taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop taxpayer-funded schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden’s radical rewrite of Title IX education regulations, and restore protections for women and girls,” the platform reads.
While some have praised the elimination of a 2016 plank advocating that parents have a right “to determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children” — which, at the time, was seen as an endorsement of allowing parents to enroll their LGBTQ-identifying children into conversion therapy — that change doesn’t reflect a rejection of conversion therapy outright.
Rather, the elimination of the language around parental decision-making seems to have been dropped over fears that it could be interpreted as allowing parents to permit their children to obtain gender-affirming care.
The platform fails to mention — positively or negatively — transgender military service, although Trump has promised, if elected, to reinstitute a policy he enforced during his last term as president, under which transgender individuals were prohibited from serving in the Armed Forces unless they agreed to willingly closet their identities and not seek to socially or medically transition.
Other planks of the official platform include calls for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, deporting “pro-Hamas radicals,” building a “great Iron Dome” over the United States, imposing tariffs on all U.S. imports, and ending the so-called “weaponization of the Department of Justice.”
The platform calls for eliminating the electric vehicle mandate, so-called “election protection” measures like requiring voter ID and proof of citizenship to cast a ballot, and — in an effort to attract older voters — a plank that calls for no cuts or changes to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, including raising the retirement age.
The delegates ultimately voted for the revised platform during closed-door proceedings by a vote of 84-18.
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