On Thursday, The Iowa Standard spoke with a member of the Republican Party of Iowa Platform Committee. We had heard the vote to remove the marriage plank from the platform was unanimous. However, as it turns out, that is not true.
The plank was removed with at least three members of the 15-member committee in opposition. The plank said:
We believe that traditional, two-parent (one male (XY) and one female (XX)), marriage-based families are the foundation to a stable, enduring, and healthy civilization. We encourage the repeal of any laws allowing any marriage that is not between one natural man and one natural woman.
Based on what the member of the committee we spoke with said, the chairman of the committee suggested removal of the plank because they didn’t see it possibly happening. Tim Busch served as the chairman. There was discussion about legislation regarding the marriage issue that didn’t advance in the Iowa legislature.
“I believed our platform should read such that anything that we would really want as a Party should be in there,” said the member of the committee we spoke with. “These are stances, not just legislative priorities alone. So things that have gone through that we still believe strongly in should still be in our platform as a stance. Just because it has been acted on and something has been implemented doesn’t mean we should remove it because then, all the sudden if the issue comes up for a vote again and we no longer have something in the platform about it, that would make elected officials free to choose. I don’t want that to be the situation.”
This member of the committee said they believe the platform should be used as a “measuring stick” for elected officials and to portion out support at the local level.
“It should be a function of how well elected officials adhere to the legislative priorities and stances that we have in our platform,” they said. “That’s what I’ve heard many other people articulate as I’ve been part of the process this year.”
The plank regarding marriage and the importance of children having a mom and a dad wasn’t the only one removed by the committee. The committee also removed the plank in opposition to Convention of the States.
The member we talked to said it was a split 7-7 vote, but the chairman decided to strike it from the platform.
“We have a good Constitution,” the member we talked to said. “We have a system in place to update it if we need to. Opening it up to a Convention of States is like throwing it all out there and then anything can happen. It will most likely end up with a curtailment of our Bill of Rights, which would take us from being citizens to being subjects.”
I was stunned to hear that the platform committee believes it has the power to unilaterally remove planks, such as the anti-COS platform, which were adopted by all four district conventions!
This is precisely the problem that the Republican Party is supposed to be addressing, I.e. people in power ignoring the will of the people.
We were also repeatedly fed the nonsense, by some speakers, that a platform could not address specific legislative issues but only general principles because the platform was not the Iowa Code.
The same people then told us that we didn’t need a statement supporting the Second Amendment because we had a plank opposing Red Flag laws. As Lucy would say “Good Grief!”.