Action Alert

Texas GOP Platform Calls for Dismantling of the ADA
Targeting People with Disabilities During an Election Year

(August 3, 2004) Your action is urgently needed to contact President Bush and the Texas Republican Party and tell them to reverse their call for an amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which would eliminate protections for millions of citizens with disabilities.

The platform goes after those that are currently the most disenfranchised citizens in our country – children with learning and behavioral disabilities, individuals with HIV, and those with mental disabilities. (Congress, of course,  already thought about coverage of people with mental disabilities and infectious diseases when they passed the ADA – at the time there were proposed amendments to exclude people with mental disabilities & HIV that were soundly defeated.)

Furthermore, the GOP platform politicizes the ADA, a nonpartisan law, by trying to associate it with hot button issues and seeking to “exclude” categories such as “homosexual practices”  that are NOT – and never were – covered by the ADA

Page 14 of the 2004 Texas State Republican Party Platform reads:

Americans with Disabilities Act – The Party supports amendment of the Americans with Disabilities Act to exclude from its definition those persons with infectious diseases, substance addiction, learning disabilities, behavior disorders, homosexual practices and mental stress, thereby reducing abuse of the Act.

The entire document is available online in PDF at: http://www.texasgop.org/library/RPTPlatform2004.pdf

What You Can Do:

- Use the information below to contact President Bush (whose own father signed the ADA into law), the Platform Committee Chair, and the Republican Party of Texas.

- Tell them to take this divisive and bigoted proposal out of the Texas Republican Party Platform!

- With the ADA being weakened in the courts, with growing waiting lists for mental health services, and with millions of Americans with disabilities needlessly forced to live in institutions, ask them why they are targeting some of America’s most disenfranchised citizens during this election year…

President George Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, US 20500
Phone: (202) 456-1414
Fax: (202) 456-2461

Mr. Kirk Overbey, Chair of Platform Committee
6306 Leatherwood Cove
Austin, Texas 78759

Republican Party of Texas
900 Congress, Suite 300 Austin, Texas 78701
Phone: 512.477.9821
Fax: 512.480.0709
E-mail: info@texasgop.org
 

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