Texas Republican Party Releases 2014 Party Platform

Nearly two weeks after the Republican Party of Texas adopted its 2014 platform, the party has released it in full.

This month, Texas Republicans gathered in Fort Worth for the biennial state GOP convention and discussed the platform. Delegates voted to remove the "Texas Solution" from the platform, reverting to a more hardline stance on immigration that calls for ending in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants and prohibiting sanctuary cities — municipalities that do not enforce immigration laws. The Texas Solution had included a call for a national guest-worker program when GOP delegates approved it in 2012.

The platform is a nonbinding set of principles for the party, but it serves as an important political statement.

The newly adopted platform also endorses reparative therapy for gays — counseling and psychological treatments that aim to turn people straight. The plank garnered national media attention as news of its consideration spread outside of Texas. Committee members said that the language wasn’t meant to impose the therapy on others, but to endorse it and recognize its “legitimacy and efficacy.”

For years, the party's plank on homosexuality said that “the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society and contributes to the breakdown of the family unit.” This year, that was replaced with a plank that maintains the party's opposition to gay marriage and states that homosexuality is a “chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths.”