Three statewide officeholders will be unopposed for nomination at Saturday’s Indiana Republican Convention. But there will be a contest over how the party platform should address same-sex marriage:
The platform proclaims the party’s belief in “strong families.” But the committee which drafted it quietly deleted a line from the 2016 version calling “marriage between a man and a woman…the foundation of society.” Morgan County Republican Chairman Daniel Elliott is co-chairing a drive to restore that language. He says a commitment to the importance of traditional marriage is a core issue for the typical Republican voter in Indiana. And while the U-S Supreme Court ended the legal debate over same-sex marriage three years ago, Elliott says the issue isn’t just about homosexuality, but about explicitly endorsing marriage as a critical family structure in and of itself.
Hendricks County Chairman Mike O’Brien, who supported the new language on the platform committee, says relitigating the marriage debate hinders Republicans’ ability to expand the party’s reach. He says voters who believe in limited government and fiscal conservatism should be welcome in the party regardless of their sexual orientation.
But O’Brien thinks delegates are likely to change the language back. The convention will take the unusual step of having delegates vote on which version of the plank to include. Normally, the convention simply votes to ratify the work of the party’s platform committee. That’s what happened in 2016, when an attempt to strip the traditional-marriage clause was overwhelmingly defeated.
Governor Holcomb isn’t taking sides in the platform fight, leaving the decision to delegates. But House Speaker Brian Bosma is among 36 legislators who have signed on to Elliott’s Republican Victory Committee. Four of the 26 members of the platform committee have endorsed the push to rewrite its work.
Both Elliott and O’Brien say they expect the party to reunite quickly no matter how the vote goes. Elliott says it was important to party activists to have the chance to make their voices heard, rather than have to accept whatever the platform committee produced. And O’Brien says the platform debate is primarily an internal discussion that will be quickly forgotten after the convention.