Local GOPers weigh in
Sunday, hundreds of California Republicans gathered in a banquet room of the San Francisco Airport Hotel for the general session of the California Republican Party’s (CRP) Spring Convention. On the agenda for the meeting was the ratification of the Party’s platform. Every four years the CRP redrafts the platform that will govern the principles of the party for the next four years.
In August of last year, at a meeting of the CRP Drafting Committee, moderate members of the California Republican Party had drafted a platform that loosened the party’s stances on gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, and family values. That platform passed in a near unanimous vote with 30 delegates in favor and only 2 in opposition.
Later in September, 2011, after significant resistance from conservatives in the party, the Platform Committee voted against the “moderate” platform proposal and instead submitted an updated version of the 2008 platform which included the following plank:
“We believe public policy and education should not be exploited to present or teach homosexuality as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle. We oppose same-sex partner benefits, child custody and adoption.”
The updated platform favored by the conservatives was approved in a voice vote. There was significant opposition.
One delegate, Ryan Trabuco, a veteran of 13 CRP Conventions, vice president of the Log Cabin Republicans of San Diego County and president of the Clairemont Town Council told San Diego LGBT Weekly before the vote: “LCR members and moderates are encouraged to vote their conscience on the platform.” When asked whether he supported the platform, Trabuco said, “I and others plan to oppose the platform on principle.”
Local Democratic Party Chairman Jess Durfee had a different perspective, telling LGBT Weekly, “Well you know that here in California they [members of the state Republican Party] are certainly out of step with the mainstream.”
Durfee also contrasted the position of the state party to local Republican elected officials adding, that, “When you look at Mayor Sanders, Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher and even Supervisor Ron Roberts, you would assume that they don’t agree with that [the Republican Platform]. It indicates a trend you are seeing where the Republican Party is becoming an endangered species in California, and they do this at their own peril.”
Activists such as Linda Perine, who led the Community Leadership Council’s LGBT taskforce on Redistricting went further, telling LGBT Weekly, “The Republican Party has used ignorance and divisiveness as a campaign strategy since Democrats passed the civil rights Act of 1964.”
Asked to elaborate, Perine added, “You have the ‘Southern Strategy’ – pitting whites against blacks in the South. Then locally there is pension hysteria, pitting the young against the old and then there is the what I call the ‘guns, gays and God’ strategy where they employ faux religion to demonize gay people.”
For better or worse, the Republican Party has ratified the conservatives’ platform – a platform that will govern the party’s positions, endorsements and philosophy until 2016 when delegates will reconvene to draft a new platform.
