Life
An unwavering commitment to defend life and to promote policies that safeguard the intrinsic dignity of the human person from conception until natural death. To this end, we advocate legal protections for vulnerable persons, as well as laws that facilitate authentic human freedom and ensure that all people have access to everything they need to thrive. Our whole-life approach guides the entire platform below, including subsequent segments on the right to a social safety net.
Federal and local governments must enact constitutional and legal measures establishing the right to life from conception until natural death. These measures specifically include a constitutional amendment clarifying that there is no right to abortion, as well as laws that prohibit or restrict abortion. Because human life begins at conception, the intentional destruction of human embryos in any context must end.
Federal and local governments must end taxpayer funding of organizations that provide, promote, or facilitate abortions, and of health-care plans that include abortion coverage. Such funding should be redirected to organizations that promote healthy pregnancies and prenatal care.
I support efforts to help prevent the tragedy of suicide, including universal access to affordable mental-health care and the destigmatization of mental illness. Assisted suicide and euthanasia are a violation of disability rights, medical ethics, and human dignity, and must be prohibited in every state.
Federal and local governments should collaborate to guarantee universal healthcare by diverse means, including single-payer initiatives, direct subsidization of provider networks, subsidized education for medical professionals willing to work in rural areas, support for cost-sharing programs and mutual aid societies, home care grants, simplified regulation, and the easing of restrictions on the importation of prescription drugs.
Health policy must include protections for those with preexisting, chronic, and terminal conditions. We must include those who have no means to save for an emergency, people at every stage of life from prenatal care to hospice care, and people who find themselves in need of medical assistance while away from their home network.
The federal government needs to negotiate pricing to end corporate exploitation of the captive audience of patients.
Family
The natural family, founded on the marriage of one man and one woman, is the fundamental unit and basis of every human society. Family breakdown is a key contributor to widespread social problems in this country. In order to promote stable families, it is in the interest of the state to support marriage recognized as the exclusive union of one man and one woman for life. At the same time, we recognize that the state must support the needs of people—especially children, as well as the elderly and disabled—in families of all kinds.
States should repeal policies that penalize couples for getting married or that encourage divorce. At the same time, such reforms should not come at the cost of helping single parents.
States must repeal no-fault divorce laws, which effectively undermine the permanence of marriage. At the same time, it is vital to continue efforts to prevent and prosecute domestic violence.
In opposition to the commodification of children and the reproductive process, gestational surrogacy contracts and sperm banks should be prohibited. Adoption and fostering should be encouraged as a redemptive alternative, but with the understanding that the separation of children from their biological parents is never the primary goal.
Federal and local governments should allow public funding for services that promote stable, healthy marriages and the flourishing of children, even when such services are provided by religious institutions with religious values.
Pregnancy, childbirth, and neonatal care should all be fully covered by all healthcare plans so that no family need worry about the expenses of bringing a child into the world.
Workplace accommodations for parents, including paid parental leave, flexible scheduling, and affordable child care should be available to as many families as possible. Further, no family should be forced to have two full-time incomes just to survive, and thus policies subsidizing child care by parents staying at home should be enacted. Funding and services should also be provided to encourage families to care for elderly and disabled family members at home without being impoverished by lost income. This could include preferential housing options, tax credits, and respite care.
We reject the idea that surgical or hormonal treatment to circumvent the natural, healthy development and function of the body is necessary health care. In particular, we vigorously defend the right of parents to protect their minor children from such treatment. We call for legislation prohibiting any form of gender reassignment surgery on children.
To create a more pro-family culture and strengthen the social fabric of neighborhoods, we favor efforts to make public spaces child-friendly, encourage outdoor play, and reform legal and administrative practices that unfairly penalize parents for giving children a reasonable degree of independence.
Economics
I advocate for social safety nets that adequately provide for the material needs of the most vulnerable in society. These programs need to also help the most vulnerable find a path out of poverty by providing them with the tools they need in order to fully participate in their communities with dignity, and not trap them as subsidized labor for private interests.
Education
Education is vital to the formation of the human person and the good of society.
Responsibility for the education of children resides primarily in the family. Families should be free to home-school their children or send them to public or private schools.
We call for public support of both public and private schools, with a preferential option for economically disadvantaged students and an emphasis on making teaching a well-paying occupation.
Teachers should be free to design their own curricula within general parameters set by local authorities. Standardized testing should not be the most significant factor in measuring the success of students and schools.
Local school systems should reconsider the overuse of technology in the classroom.
Local school systems should undertake initiatives that expand education beyond reading, writing, mathematics, science, social studies, and the arts. Additional subjects should include virtue and citizenship, understanding of the natural world, agriculture, trades, life skills, and useful crafts.
Local governments should increase public investment in higher education, resulting in a reduction of tuition at public institutions. To improve the consistent quality of higher education, for-profit educational enterprises must be more strictly regulated. The government should consider proposals for partial forgiveness of student loans, along with more opportunities to work off debt.
Sex education classes, when offered, should be required to include accurate information on prenatal development, the risks of hormonal contraceptives, and the scientific evidence that abortion takes a human life.
Religious Liberty and Civil Rights
I deplore secularism that seeks to remove religion from the public sphere. We are committed to the “free exercise of religion, which should not be limited to “freedom of worship” that merely exists in private and within a house of worship. Faith is a public expression.
Federal and local governments must safeguard laws that protect religious institutions, small businesses, and private individuals from civil or criminal liability for choosing to follow their conscience in matters regarding life, healthcare, morality, sexuality, and marriage.
Federal and local governments must safeguard conscience protections for employers and charities in health, education, and welfare that do not wish to participate in activities that contradict their sincerely-held convictions. In particular, we are in solidarity with religiously-affiliated institutions such as colleges, adoption agencies, and hospitals, which are facing pressure in some states to compromise on principles central to their doctrines.
The prohibition against an establishment of religion does not require the eradication of religious symbols from community events and property. So long as nobody is compelled to endorse or participate in an activity, communities should have the freedom to celebrate religious events and express religious values, without artificial distinctions that force religious believers to check their faith at the public door.
All levels of government must defend the rights of public assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, understood through the tradition of ordered liberty.
Laws against prostitution should focus on removing those participating from the cycle of exploitation, mandating penalties primarily on those who buy sex or arrange for its purchase. Closely tied to this is the need to aggressively combat human trafficking.
It is also vital to recognize the social costs of pornography, which is inseparable from human trafficking, the promotion of pedophilia, and rape. We therefore support laws which criminalize the production and sale of pornography and deny categorically that pornography is protected speech.
