CLEVELAND ― After a week of wrangling, Republican delegates officially voted on Monday to adopt their 2016 platform, a policy blueprint that manages to take ultraconservative positions on same-sex marriage, religion, pornography, and even national parks.
The document, which was adopted at the GOP convention by a voice vote, was the product of vigorous debate among the platform committee last week and marks a stark shift for a party that has already seemed to veer toward extremism.
The platform openly opposes marriage for gay and transgender people, states “that man-made law must be consistent with God-given, natural rights,” and calls on the U.S. government to transfer all federally controlled lands to states.
The platform also calls pornography a “public health crisis” while making no such designation for guns, which would allow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study gun violence from a health policy perspective.
It refers to coal as a “clean” energy source, affirms Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and finds other ways to ostracize Latino voters.
While a functionally meaningless messaging document, the platform is a signal of where Republicans stand ― and how they’ve shifted in the last four years. As Trump’s ascendancy to the nomination indicates, Republicans are headed in a direction seemingly at odds with the lessons laid out in an autopsy of Mitt Romney’s 2012 election loss.
Read the full platform below: