Montana's GOP Insists Gay People Should Be Jailed
Forget disagreements about same-sex marriage, or even anti-discrimination legislation. When it comes to the Montana Republican Party and their official platform, LGBT people need to fight just to be kept out of prison. That's because the Montana GOP is calling for homosexuality to be illegal.Literally.
"We support the clear will of the people of Montana expressed by legislation to keep homosexual acts illegal,"the Montana GOP platform reads.
Not sure how the Montana GOP knows that the clear will of the people is to make homosexuality illegal. After all, the Montana Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on sodomy years before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down nationwide sodomy laws in 2003's Lawrence v. Texas.
But maybe the Montana GOP is taking a cue from local Tea Party activists. Folks like Tim Ravndal, who in an infamous Facebook conversation, admitted that if he had his way, gay people would be tied up outside and potentially left for dead. Ravndal's punishment for making such a comment was to have his title within Montana's Tea Party taken away. (He's since fought that, and other Tea Party activists have joined with him, suggesting that there will be a war with gay people if Ravndal's position isn't reinstated.)
Either way, for a GOP platform to call for the criminalization of homosexuality is shocking, particularly at a time when more and more members of the Republican Party are either coming out as gay themselves, or fighting hard to open the GOP umbrella wide enough to create a space for LGBT people.
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