Critics Erupt Over Vicious Attack On LGBTQ Community By Texas GOP

A smiling Tyler Huckabee spreads his cape early this month in Watauga, Texas, while protesting in front of Stedfast Baptist Church, where a pastor preaches against homosexuality.   (Photo: Yffy Yossifor/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Image)

The Texas Republican Party is getting blasted for its shocking new platform declaring that “homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice.”

The party’s updated mission statement, passed Saturday at its convention in Houston, also declares opposition to “all efforts to validate transgender identity” ― and calls for a ban on any gender-affirming medical care, including hormone therapy, for anyone under the age of 21.

At the same time, it supports debunked and dangerous “conversion therapy” — which it now calls “Reintegrative Therapy” — to eliminate “same-sex attraction.”

“These are just crazy people,” Michael Cargill told KXAN-TV in Austin, speaking about the Texas Republican Convention. Cargill — the acting chairman of the Log Cabin Republicans of Texas, which represents LGBTQ Republicans — lashed the party’s “hateful language” as “un-Christian.”

The party banned the Log Cabin Republicans from having a booth at the convention this year.

They “need to dig deep into the Bible, spend a little time in church on Sunday and listen to what the Lord says about loving all of his children,” Cargill said.

Even Donald Trump Jr. suggested it was political suicide for the party to fight with other conservative Republicans, who may be LGBTQ, instead of going after Democrats and “RINOs,” shorthand for “Republicans in name only.”

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, attributed the hard-right turn by an already extremist party to Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump radicalized the party and accelerated the demands from the base,” he told The Texas Tribune. “There simply aren’t limits now on what the base might ask for.”

Twitter was flooded Monday with criticism of a party that cannot tolerate members of the LGBTQ community but can tolerate forcing a 12-year-old girl to have the baby of her rapist and accepts the murder of 19 children in Uvalde, Texas, as the cost of having firearms.

Political commentator Lindy Li said the real thing that’s “abnormal” is Texas Republicans — as several other critics also noted.

Activist actor George Takei lashed the new state party platform as “neo-fascist dehumanization,” noting that targeting vulnerable groups and classifying them as enemies is straight from the fascist playbook.

Li also wondered if gay billionairePeter Thiel will now stop forking over hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican Party.

Plenty of others attacked the extremist Texans too.

In other platform issues, party delegates voted to support barring the teaching of sex and sexuality in schools while calling on Texas schools to teach the “dignity of the preborn human” and that life begins at fertilization.

Delegates also declared Joe Biden’s presidential election victory illegitimate — and  rebuked Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn for his support of a bipartisan agreement on gun safety legislation.

“Whereas all gun control is a violation of the Second Amendment and our God-given rights, we reject the so-called ‘bipartisan gun agreement,’ and we rebuke John Cornyn,” the platform states.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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