To RNC Chairman Michael Whatley and Platform Chairwoman Marsha Blackburn,
On Monday the GOP Platform Committee met and adopted its new party platform. Given that this document lays out the guiding principles for the party and that research shows the political parties vote in line with their platform nearly 80% of the time, this is an important, guiding document.
While the new platform provides a good platform for President Trump's campaign, it lacks the enduring principles upon which a party can stand as important language on the topic of life was removed; language that had been in each GOP platform for almost 50 years. It was adopted in a clearly choreographed and scripted process which did not allow amendments to be discussed or voted upon. Because of this, several platform delegates submitted the following minority report:
The undersigned, a minority of the committee, elected to the 2024 National Republican Platform Committee, not agreeing in totality with the majority, desire to express our views as follows:
Not having an opportunity to entertain amendments to the "draft" platform document, we submit the following expression for the continued protection of the unborn through support of a human life amendment.
Less than one week ago, our nation celebrated the 248th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That founding document proved a watershed moment in world history. It planted and reinforced in the minds of men and women everywhere the conviction that each of us is endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
The Declaration is the heritage of all Americans, always true but likewise always straining to be realized, for the slave as well as for the free, for women as well as for men, for the poor as well as the rich. For Republicans, from the very inception of our party, the words of the Declaration took form in two overarching moral propositions, that is, the rejection and elimination of what our very first platform in 1856 called "the twin relics of barbarism," slavery and polygamy. We note with sober reflection how vast a cost the people of the United States paid for the achievement of that platform's commitments, and how long a period passed before those goals could be achieved.
Today we observe the vitality of a more recent but analogous set of commitments, embodied most prominently in the promise of the Republican Party to preserve the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death. That commitment made its way into the platform of 1976, twelve decades after that original session in Philadelphia. That commitment to a human life amendment and a call for the Fourteenth Amendment's protection application to children before birth has been repeated in every platform since and, by this declaration of principle, we extend it now.
In no season, under no rationale spurred by the exigencies of a political moment, can or should we abandon the high principles that have created and sustained this party, with God’s grace, into a third century.
In the coming years, we pledge ourselves to continue to work for the good of every child, every parent, and every family. We rededicate ourselves to the core policy positions endorsed through deliberation and transparency with ever-increasing clarity in previous platforms, with respect to the funding of abortion domestically and internationally, the expansion of alternatives to abortion, support for credits for adoption and all children, ending the exploitation of embryonic human beings, and above all recognizing the application of 14th amendment protections to our developing offspring. These are issues for the ages and not for any single cycle in our national life.
With heaviness of heart but fullness of optimism that the defense of life will inevitably prevail, we resubmit these ideals to our fellow Americans. As before, we do fondly hope and fervently pray that the scourge of abortion will speedily pass away, and to that end we renew our perpetual devotion and ceaseless labor to the cause of life.
I, as a Republican voter, support this minority report as submitted to the GOP Platform Committee. I encourage you and all in leadership to continue to stand for unborn life.
