A few days old, but making the rounds today on the right side of Twitter. In case you’re keeping score on the great Republican “values” battle: Huckabee 1, Daniels 0.

The GOP there has voted on a platform that would ban oral and anal sex. It also would give jail sentences to anyone who issues a marriage license to a same-sex couple (even though such licenses are already invalid in the state)…

In addition, the platform says that homosexuality “tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit and leads to the spread of dangerous communicable diseases.”…

The 25-page proposal, presented last week as a guide for the state GOP over the next two years, includes other measures including outlawing “sexually oriented businesses” like strip clubs and banning “all pornography.”

Here’s the platform in PDF form. I can’t find last year’s version online to see whether the “values” rhetoric is something new or whether it’s standard operating procedure from year to year, but based on this lefty commentary from 2008, sure sounds like it’s the latter. The news here, in other words, isn’t that Texas is trending towards social conservatism, it’s that it’s not trending towards libertarianism despite the influence of people like Glenn Beck and Ron Paul and the greater priority given to fiscal issues by the righty base since The One took office. But then, is Texas really the place you’d expect to see a libertarian trend show up in the platform? A deep red state will have enough traditional conservatives to keep the platform traditionally conservative; it’s the purple-state GOPs, where views on social issues might tilt a bit more blue, that are ripe for the capturing by libertarians.

Needless to say, consider this a prelude to the inevitable wrangling over the next national Republican platform. The last one, passed in 2008, was notably less hardline about “values” than the new one from Texas, but that’s what happens when you fight on a big purple battlefield instead of a smaller red one. Exit quotation from the Republican Liberty Caucus of Texas, a libertarian outfit: “The Republican Liberty Caucus believes that cutting government spending is more important than wasting our limited resources on policies that open Texas to lawsuits and treat some citizens in a different manner than other citizens. Texas RLC members believe divisive social issues should be put on the back burner and instead the focus should be on solving real problems.”