Ted Cruz attacks gay soldiers, transgender people and marriage equality
He claims gays lower military morale and calls marriage equality a "threat" to democracy
Ted Cruz continues to remind LGBT voters why his extreme edge of the Republican Party have nothing to offer them. In a conference call for conservative activsists, Cruz blamed gay people for lowering military morale, promised to end same-sex marriages, criticized President Obama for supporting transgender soldiers, and invoked a familiar religious rhetoric as justification for being such an awful human being.
Just another day on the campaign trail, then.
As reported by Right Wing Watch, Cruz participated in the conference call organized by E.W. Jackson, a former nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia. Jackson gained notoriety during his campaign for his extreme views on the LGBT community — he called gay people “perverted,” “degenerate,” and “frankly very sick people.” During the call, Cruz was asked by one activist whether he would reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of marriage equality.
Cruz retorted by calling the ruling “one of the greatest threats to our democracy we had seen in modern times.
“My response to this decision was that it was illegitimate, it was lawless, it was utterly contrary to the Constitution and that we should fight to defend marriage on every front,” he continued. He vowed to introduce constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage and “strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over challenges to marriage,” while promising that his Presidency would “not use the federal government to enforce this lawless decision that is a usurpation of the authority of we the people in this country.”
At Jackson’s provocation — “The military is beset with these new LGBT rules and I’m just hearing terrible things,” he said — Cruz launched into an attack on the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the possibility of an end to the ban on transgender servicemembers.
“You look at the military and one of the things we’ve seen is morale in the military under the Obama administration has plummeted, and it has plummeted because you have a commander-in-chief that doesn’t support our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines,” he said, adding that President Obama, “Treats the military as a cauldron for social experimentation. He’s more interested in promoting homosexuality in the military than he is in defeating our enemy.”
Cruz claims that the military is “now focused on trying to promote transgendered [sic] soldiers,” decrying it as “some left-wing social experiment.”
Jackson later took the opportunity to agree with Cruz, after calling him a “real believer,” telling those on the call that Cruz would “reverse this garbage and go in and clean the military up and get that transgender craziness out of the military and stop this implementation of this sexual-psycho garbage that this president has foisted on the military.
“How are we going to move on and be prosperous as a nation if we are spitting in the face of Almighty God?” Jackson added. “And that is exactly what this whole homosexual, same-sex, transgender stuff has done.”
Cruz’s remarks should come as no surprise to anyone who’s followed his career. He believes that homosexuality is a choice, wants to strip federal benefits from same-sex families, and once attempted to justify his own homophobia by comparing it to ISIS killing gay people — among various other statements.
For a deeper glimpse into Cruz’s LGBT attitudes, read our handy list of 10 anti-gay statements by the Senator from Texas.
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