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How Different Is the 2024 Republican Party Platform? This Different.

July 26, 2024

By this time, many Americans may have heard that the 2024 Republican Party platform differs significantly from all its previous platforms, but they may not understand the specific changes that have been made on the issues of life, marriage, family, religious liberty, and numerous other policies that concern conservative Christians. A new document now helps analyze the changes.

The legacy media have covered the issue, sometimes mixing truth with error. “The party has watered down its stance on abortion and transferred responsibility to the states,” reported Politico truthfully. “Anti-trans policies are prevalent,” it fibbed. The Beltway website also claims the platform’s concern of women’s privacy is “building on fears already present in the 2016 platform about trans people in public restrooms and locker rooms,” while neither document claimed to be based on “fear.”

FRC Action has released a new guide comparing the 2024 Republican Party platform with its predecessor, noting the stark changes on pivotal policies. “We cover how God is mentioned and appealed to and referenced in the document,” said Travis Weber, vice president for Policy and Government Affairs at Family Research Council, on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Wednesday. “We look at the issues of life, marriage, family, sexuality, Israel, religious freedom, and related issues,” such as parental rights, homeschooling, and the public school curriculum.

The most recent predecessor to the current platform is the 2016 Republican Party platform, since the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC), significantly scaled down due to government COVID-19 policies, voted unanimously to “adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention,’ because it “did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement.”

For instance, the 2016 platform mentions God 15 times. The 2024 Republican platform mentions God only twice. “In 2024, there is only one reference to ‘our rights under God,’” noted Weber, as well as a passing reference that the American people “Trust in God’s Good Grace.” By contrast, the 2016-20 platform defines the notion “that God bestows certain inalienable rights on every individual, thus producing human equality” as one of the “fundamental precepts of American government.” Government exists to protect those rights. It further specifies that “man-made law must be consistent with God-given, natural rights; and that if God-given, natural, inalienable rights come in conflict with government, court, or human-granted rights, God-given, natural, inalienable rights always prevail.”

Perhaps the most controversial change regards abortion. Aside from promising to oppose late-term abortion, the 2024 platform endorses no national policy to protect the unborn, leaving the matter entirely to the states. Yet it expresses an important philosophical and jurisprudential change, as well.

“One of the most significant changes here in 2016, we had language that read that ‘We support legislation to make clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.’ The 2024 [platform] says, ‘We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process, and that states are therefore free to pass laws protecting those rights.’ That makes no reference to the unborn being protected under the 14th Amendment,” Weber told Perkins. “That reference does not include the unborn, so the unborn are not specifically mentioned as included under the 14th Amendment in the 2024 language.”

“A number of other life-related provisions have been removed, including funding or defunding of abortion and provisions that bar taxpayer dollars from going to fund abortionists at home or abroad, including Planned Parenthood,” Weber noted. Polls consistently show up to three-quarters of Americans oppose overseas funding of abortion.

“This should be a no-brainer,” said Weber. “We need to have moral clarity about that. Yet the 2024 platform does not deal with that” policy.

FRC Action Chairman Tony Perkins replied, although Republican platforms dating back to 1976 had advocated protecting the right to life of unborn children as “an aspirational goal, I think it led to the overturn of Roe” by the Supreme Court in 2022.

Perkins also noted the latest platform does not mention “the harvesting of embryos for the purpose of experimentation.” National backlash built when undercover videos showed Planned Parenthood executives blithely sipping wine while discussing the sale of aborted babies’ organs to investigative reporters nearly a decade ago. But Perkins noted that conservatives “had to fight” some forces in the George W. Bush administration to make sure frozen embryos could not be used for experimentation. This platform “embraces IVF [in vitro fertilization], which is fine, but there’s no boundaries, no barriers. And that could open wide up this experimentation once again of human embryos.”

The latest platform also made a subtle but important sleight-of-hand on the definition of marriage and family, Weber stated. “In 2016-2020 there was a definition of marriage and affirms it’s between one man and one woman, reading ‘The cornerstone of the family is natural marriage, the union of one man and one woman.’ The 2024 says Republicans will promote ‘a culture that values the sanctity of marriage, the blessings of childhood, the foundational role of families. We will end policies that punish families.’ There’s an affirmation of families, but there’s not a definition of marriage between one man and one woman,” he pointed out. “That is a change. And that will allow a loophole giving leeway for people who want to” redefine marriage.

The two briefly discussed the controversial process by which the 2024 platform was adopted, which they said contrasted with promises by vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance that social conservatives will always “have a seat at the table” in the Republican Party, as long as he is associated with it. “What we saw going on in that room was very inconsistent and at odds with what J.D. Vance, the potential vice president, articulated about the way we should proceed — which I agree,” said Weber. “We should proceed in view of free and open debate, unafraid of ideas, willing to engage them, because we believe our ideas are the best for the country and for those around us. That is a positive vision.”

“But what he articulated was not on display that Monday in Milwaukee,” said Weber, one of the few non-delegates present at the RNC Platform Committee meeting.

Platform delegates were stripped of their cell phones, told how to vote, and photographed if they voted the wrong way. The process, which usually lasts for days, was compressed into a matter of minutes, then curtailed. Simultaneously, as The Washington Stand has reported, the RNC Rules Committee passed a new measure making it more difficult for grassroots activists to object to the party’s action.

“In fact, there was no discussion and there were no amendments — the first time ever that had occurred,” agreed Perkins.

“We saw a fear of ideas, a desire to stifle, not hear about ideas and suppress the messenger,” said Weber. “That is not the right way ahead for the country at any level of government, and certainly not for a party that would want to embrace the free and open debate of ideas.”

Changing the language of a political platform, which many voters will never read, “matters, because it’s the foundational policy document that the Republican Party is now putting forward,” said Weber. It is “supposed to guide the direction of the party. And we’re observing a trajectory [change] here.”

“We must not paper over that shift,” Weber declared. “People dealing with this topic and looking at the differences between these platforms have to confront this reality. They might not like confronting it, but they have to confront the reality.”

People of faith advocate for a changeless moral vision, not merely the ever-changing priorities of a single election cycle, he said. “We need to ask, ‘How does it line up with our Christian faith?’ As Christians, we are looking to Scripture. We’re looking to our faith to guide the perspective of society that includes the most blessing, the most flourishing for all human beings.”

The full comparison document is available at FRCAction.org/GOPplatform.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.