The 2012 Republican Party Platform ratified this week calls, among other things, for a federal marriage amendment upholding the traditional definition of marriage, saying:
“We reaffirm our support for a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. We applaud the citizens of the majority of States which have enshrined in their constitutions the traditional concept of marriage, and we support the campaigns underway in several other States to do so.”
The new platform also addresses religious liberty and the Obama Administration’s push to force religious organizations to pay for things like contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs, saying:
“The first provision of the First Amendment concerns freedom of religion. That guarantee reflected Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which declared that no one should ‘suffer on account of his religious opinion or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion….’ That assurance has never been more needed than it istoday, as liberal elites try to drive religious beliefs—and religious believers—out of the public square. The Founders of the American Republic universally agree that democracy presupposes a moral people and that, in the words of George Washington’s Farewell Address, ‘Of all the dispositions and habits which leadto political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.’
“The most offensive instance of this war on religion has been the current Administration’s attempt to compel faith-related institutions, as well as believing individuals, to contravene their deeply held religious, moral, or ethical beliefs regarding health services, traditional marriage, or abortion. This forcible secularization of religious and religiously affiliated organizations, including faith-based hospitals and colleges, has been in tandem with the current Administration’s audacity in declaring which faith-related activities are, or are not, protected by the First Amendment—an unprecedented aggression repudiated by a unanimous Supreme Court in its Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC decision.”
