Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)
Sen. Ted Cruz
remains a charmer. Talking with reporters at an event in his home state of Texas, Cruz offered up some of the kind of rhetoric that will likely help him fundraise with his hardcore base, but is exactly why he'd be a dream Republican nominee ... a dream for Democrats, that is.
"Is there something about the left — and I am going to put the media in this category — that is obsessed with sex?” Cruz asked after fielding multiple questions on gay rights.
Sex? Is that what Cruz thinks we're talking about when we talk about marriage equality? Does he think that when people mention his marriage to Heidi Cruz, they're talking about sex? When he meets a married couple at one of his campaign events, does his mind automatically snap to "Sex! These people have sex with each other," complete with mental images of what he thinks they do? Or is it just the marriages of LGBT people that are directly equivalent, in the mind of Ted Cruz, to sex?
Cruz also said he did not think his opposition to gay marriage will hurt his chances with moderate voters.
“With respect, I would suggest not drawing your questions from MSNBC. They have very few viewers and they are a radical and extreme partisan outlet,” Cruz told a reporter. He cited the expansion of “mandatory same-sex marriage” as an assault on religious liberty in the United States.
Yes, with the Supreme Court considering marriage equality, only MSNBC thinks the subject is newsworthy. Not only do
60 percent of Americans support marriage equality, but 64 percent of independents do. You know, moderate voters. Cruz is being asked about an entirely mainstream issue and he's responding by trying to paint it as some kind of outlandish trash. And mandatory same-sex marriage? Is this going to be a requirement to get your mandatory national ID card? Is it going to be tracked by chips embedded under our skin?
Even for voters whose support for equality is a very small part of their overall beliefs, Cruz is saying very clearly that he's outside the mainstream, backward-looking. And if he thinks that framing this as an attack on the media makes his anti-equality stance look fresh, new, bold, and daring, that too might work well as a way to part his hardcore supporters from their hard-earned dollars, but to most other people it's going to look like the hackneyed Republican campaign cliche it is.
