Another Convention, Another Radical Party Platform

Oh, this should be fun. The Texas Republican Party Convention is this weekend in Houston, and already social conservatives are pushing the party to take official positions that are sure to alienate mainstream folks. One delegate argued that the party platform should include a plank calling for the removal of naked people in paintings and sculptures in the National Gallery of Art and other public places in the nation’s capital. “You don’t have nude art on your front porch,” he said, according to the Dallas Morning News. “You possibly don’t have nude art in your living rooms. So why is it important to have that in the common places of Washington, D.C.?” In an unusual example of moderation, the party platform committee voted against that plank.

Another delegate has argued against a plank calling affirmative action “simply racism disguised as social value.” That kind of language, he said, would alienate African Americans and keep them from joining the GOP. (Gee. You think?) The platform commitee disagreed, keeping the language in the platform for now.

The platform, which the state party is set to adopt today, is likely to include support for teaching “intelligent design”/creationism alongside evolution in public schools, opposition to same-sex marriage and custody of children by gay and lesbian parents, and calls for prayer in school and a ban on abortion in all circumstances.

You can see analyses of the 2004 and 2006 state GOP platforms in two Texas Freedom Network Education Fund reports here and here. Stay tuned for an analysis of the 2008 platform.

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Creationists Strike Back

The Institute for Creation Research is launching a public relations campaign to win state approval for a master’s of science education degree from the Dallas-based group. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board unanimously rejected the group’s application last month. On Sunday the Austin American-Statesman published a full-page ad from the Institute. You can see a long version of the ad here and a TFN press release here. The group’s leaders have implied that they will also turn to the courts in their efforts to promote creationism as science in Texas.

Texas clearly has become Ground Zero in the religious right’s efforts to undermine instruction on the theory of evolution and to promote biblical creationism in its place. The State Board of Education will soon begin revising science curriculum standards for Texas public schools. The board’s creationist chairman and his supporters have already made it clear that they will insist that the standards, as well as biology textbooks that publishers submit for their approval in 2011, call into question the theory of evolution. Never mind, of course, that a sound scientific understanding of evolution is the foundation for the biological sciences.

The Texas Freedom Network’s Stand Up for Science campaign promotes sound science education in the state’s public schools.