GOP's Recipe For Inclusion: Gays Out, Mexicans Out, Inclusion Out

After Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, the Republican party conducted what it called the "most comprehensive post-election review" ever, a diagnosis of how the GOP lost and what it needs to change to have a broader appeal.

A major recommendation was that the future party platform needs to be more open and welcoming, especially concerning gay marriage and immigration.

It isn't.

A draft of the Republican Party's 2016 platform, posted by several national news outlets, is a stark rejection of several key findings from the GOP's detailed and critical autopsy of its party following the 2012 campaign, which called for more inclusion and kindness in order to attract more young voters.

Instead, it aligns more with the views of its current nominee, Donald Trump.

On LGBT Rights

The party's examination warned that for many voters, the issue of gay marriage is "a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be."

"If our Party is not welcoming and inclusive, young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out," the report said.

But here is the party's new platform:

"Our laws and our government’s regulations should recognize marriage as the union of one man and one woman and actively promote married family life as the basis of a stable and prosperous society," it says, according to The New York Times.

Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court made gay marriage the law of the land, defending the rights of gay people to marry under the 14th amendment. More than 60 percent of the country believes gay marriage should be recognized under the law, according to the latest Gallup poll, conducted in May 2016, and that number has steadily been increasing over the last 20 years.

Yet the new Republican Party platform calls for a reversal of that landmark decision.

"We do not accept the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to states," the platform draft says, according to the Times.

The platform also says that Title IX, which outlaws discrimination in education on the basis of sex, should not apply to transgender people. In May, the Obama administration issued a notice to schools saying that transgender students should be able to use whichever bathroom matches their identity.

The GOP platform roundly rejects that idea.

"Their edict to the states concerning restrooms, locker rooms and other facilities is at once illegal, ominous, and ignores privacy issues," the platform says. "We salute the several states which have filed suits against it.”

On Immigration

The 2013 report called for the party to abandon its hardline anti-immigration stance, saying “we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.”

Instead, Republicans have gone the other way.

In a move almost straight out of Trump's playbook, the new platform calls for "construction of a physical barrier and, at all ports of entry, maximum vigilance."

Trump's build-the-wall immigration policy has torpedoed his poll numbers among Hispanics. A Fox News poll from last week, for example, showed that Latinos favor Hillary Clinton roughly three to one over Trump.

The GOP's report seemed to foreshadow this exact scenario.

"We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform," the report said. "If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only."

Read excerpts from the party's new platform, posted by the New York Times, here.

Image: GOP chairman Reince Priebus via Gage Skidmore, used under Creative Commons