The Republican Platform

This doesn't refer to the pulpit with crosses that is being used in the speeches at the RNC, but the contract that the Republican party has written on America. It's not that different from previous years, but it's worth pointing out that there are two important pillars of social conservatism in it, and they are a human life amendment and the marriage amendment to the Constitution.

These amendments declare that life begins at conception, not at some other time, and that same-sex marriages as well as civil unions and other arrangements of similar sort would be made impossible. Note that not only same-sex marriages would be banned; even less controversial arrangements would become illegal. This is compassionate conservatism.

The human life amendment has several problems. The major one for me is that I believe that life begins much earlier than at conception and that all Catholic priests, night ejaculators and menstruators are baby-killers. So the Republican party is far too slack and liberal here. I suspect that they've picked conception as the point because it makes it easier to limit the cultural war just to pregnant women. Everybody knows that pregnant women should have no human rights.*

The marriage amendment also has its problems. To really defend marriage, all people should be banned from entering into this holy state and thereby staining it by their less-than-rapturous intentions. I will not be satisfied until the marriage amendment bans heterosexuals also. Only then with the real purity of marriage shine through!**

"Ownership" is a new buzzword in the platform. We are going to have an ownership economy, everybody! This means that Social Security accounts will be freed from the horrible straightjackets of government control, and everybody can then learn about how stockmarkets work (may I offer you about twenty books that I have read on it?) and enjoy Las Vegas-level pleasures of gambling with their retirement incomes on Wall Street. Other aspects of ownership economy are not as much stressed in the document. For example, who will the owned ones be? I have my suspicions.

The rest of the platform consists of all the expected stuff: terrorism, terrorism, (Iraq), terrorism, terrorism, and so on.


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* This is a joke.
**This is also a joke.