Tuesday, November 17, 2015 11:34:26 PM
Ted Cruz and the Anti-Gay Pastor
Senator Ted Cruz spoke at the National Religious Liberties Conference in Des Moines on Nov. 6.
Credit Mark Kauzlarich/Reuters
By KATHERINE STEWART
NOV. 16, 2015
EARLIER this month, in Des Moines, the prominent home-schooling advocate and pastor Kevin Swanson again called for [ http://news.yahoo.com/republican-candidates-attend-rally-where-014821801.html ] the punishment of homosexuality by death. To be clear, he added that the time for eliminating America’s gay population was “not yet” at hand. We must wait for the nation to embrace the one true religion, he suggested, and gay people must be allowed to repent and convert.
Mr. Swanson proposed this at the National Religious Liberties Conference, an event he organized. Featured speakers included [ https://freedom2015.org/ ] three Republican contenders for the presidency: the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
Mr. Huckabee later pleaded ignorance [ http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2015/11/12/huckabee-claims-ignorance-on-host-whos-espoused-death-to-homosexuals ]. Yet a quick web search will turn up Mr. Swanson’s references to the demonic power of “the homosexual Borg,” the unmitigated evil of Harry Potter and the Disney character Princess Elsa’s lesbian agenda [ http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-26759342 ].
Mr. Cruz apparently felt little need to make excuses. He was accompanying another of the featured speakers at the conference: his father, Rafael Cruz — a politically connected pastor who told [ http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2013/08/10/rafael-cruz-warns-family-leadership-summit-of-socialist-threat-to-u-s ] a 2013 Family Leadership Summit that same-sex marriage was a government plot to destroy the family.
On Saturday, father and son traveled to Bob Jones University in South Carolina to join a Rally for Religious Liberty. Among the speakers was Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, who has called L.G.B.T. activists “hateful” and “pawns” of the devil.
The comfortable thing to do would be to dismiss Mr. Swanson as just another wombat from the embarrassing fringe of American politics. But that would be a mistake. Mr. Swanson’s murderous imaginings did not interfere with his ability to attract senior Republican figures to his conference, including as a keynote speaker Bob Vander Plaats, an Iowa politician who will grant the “Most Wanted Endorsement of 2016,” according to [ https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2015/08/an-interview-with-the-most-wanted-endorsement-of-2016 ] the Conservative Review.
Mr. Swanson is the product of a significant political movement that has coalesced around the theme of religious liberty. Many of its leaders and their allies appear at the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voters Summit. Other power centers include Liberty University (now a required stop on the campaign trail); conservative policy organizations like the American Family Association and Concerned Women for America; and Christian legal advocacy groups like Liberty Counsel (whose co-founder, Mat Staver, acted [ http://www.advocate.com/religion/2015/10/02/liberty-counsel-claims-vatican-lying-about-popes-kim-davis-meeting ] as Kim Davis’s lawyer) and the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal powerhouse behind the Hobby Lobby decision (whose president, Alan Sears, co-wrote [ http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/05/01/3429448/alliance-defending-freedom/ ] a book in 2003 titled “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today”).
When talking about religious conservatives in America, we might perhaps conjure up an image of a farmer in Iowa or a small-business owner in Ohio who goes to church and holds traditional values. But the leaders to whom such conservatives deliver their votes have a distinct, often different, political vision.
When they hail religious liberty, they do not mean the right to pray and worship with other believers. Instead, the phrase has become a catchall for tactical goals of seeking exemptions from the law on religious grounds. To claim exception from the law as a right of “religious refusal” is, of course, the same as claiming the power to take the law into one’s own hands.
The leaders of this movement are breathtakingly radical. Like Mr. Swanson, they feel persecuted and encircled in a hostile world. Like him, they believe that America will find peace only when all submit to the one true religion.
True, few share Mr. Swanson’s taste for genocidal fantasy. But they do share the ultimate goal of capturing the power of the state and remaking society in ways most Americans would find extreme: a world in which men rule in families, women’s reproductive freedom is curtailed and “Bible believers” run the government.
This movement is a power to be reckoned with in Republican Party politics. Mr. Cruz, for one, is basing his strategy on winning its support. Ben Carson told [ http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2015/11/11/ben-carson-secular-progressives-are-trying-to-push-god-out-of-our-lives/ ] a Liberty University convocation this month of his concern that so many people “are trying to push God out of our lives.” And early this year, Mr. Jindal hosted a religious revival rally on the Louisiana State University campus that was sponsored by the American Family Association.
But the real influence of the movement is in the less visible realm of state legislatures. In 2015 alone, 87 religious refusal-related bills were introduced in 28 states.
All of this raises some unsettling questions about political life in the United States. When presidential candidates court support among the audience of a pastor who openly discusses the extermination of millions of their fellow citizens, why is this not major news?
Most functioning democratic parties in the modern world have mechanisms for marginalizing elements whose presence will ultimately prove destructive to both the political system and the party itself. What has happened to the Republican Party’s immune system?
And why are the rest of us complacent? Because a majority of the public has swung behind same-sex marriage, pundits would have us believe that the culture war is over. The leaders of the religious liberty movement may have lost that fight, but they’re still on the march — crusading through the courts and state legislatures.
It would be foolish to underestimate their resolve.
Katherine Stewart [ http://www.thegoodnewsclub.com/about ] is the author of “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Good-News-Club-Christian/dp/1586488430 ].”
© 2015 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/opinion/campaign-stops/ted-cruz-and-the-anti-gay-pastor.html [with comments]
--
Ted Cruz’s Laughable Disguise
Ben Wiseman
By Frank Bruni
NOV. 14, 2015
THE venerated political strategist David Axelrod once described a presidential campaign as “an M.R.I. for the soul.” It winds up being precisely that.
But in its earliest stages, a presidential campaign is more like a costume ball.
And right now, perhaps no candidate wears a mask as thick as Ted Cruz’s.
He had it on during last week’s debate, when he lashed out at any Republican who gave any ground on illegal immigration.
“The politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande,” he thundered, and there was no mistaking the contempt he meant to communicate for those elite, out-of-touch professionals.
But where does that contempt leave him?
He’s a lawyer, with a degree from Harvard, which was his steppingstone to a conventionally ambitious Supreme Court clerkship.
Where does that contempt leave his wife, Heidi?
She’s a banker, on leave from a job with Goldman Sachs in Houston, where she ran the wealth management unit, which focuses on clients with an average net worth of $40 million.
To hear Cruz talk — or, rather, grandstand — he’s the ultimate outsider, the consummate underdog, in perpetual conflict with the ruling class and in perfect harmony with common folk.
There’s rarely mention of Harvard. Or of Princeton, where he got his college diploma.
There’s rarely mention of his stint [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/30/the-absolutist-2 ] in the policy shop of George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, a dynastic enterprise that was as pure an expression of the Republican establishment’s wishes as could be.
There’s rarely mention of his role in recruiting John Roberts, who would later get a seat on the Supreme Court, to the legal team doing battle for Bush during the 2000 Florida recount. No, that would undercut his rants now about Roberts’s insufficiently pure conservatism as the high court’s chief justice.
It would emphasize how well connected Cruz is. And it would contradict his pose for the presidential race, in which he’s the prairie populist, replete with Western iconography and attire.
The current chapter of the 2016 contest has brought fresh focus to the fibs that candidates tell about themselves, the tweaks they make to their biographies, the misimpressions they promote.
Did Ben Carson really try to stab someone during a rage-filled youth? Was Hillary Clinton sincere about joining the Marines, or is this assertion like that Bosnian sniper fire that she hallucinated?
Embellishment is the order of the day, to a point where you begin to wonder if Brian Williams was less the exception than the rule; if it’s human instinct to aggrandize (and to start believing the aggrandizement); and if success on the scale that most of the presidential contenders have achieved involves especially fanciful myth making, also known as shamelessness.
But the lies aren’t all of the same size, shape and hue. Most of Carson’s fall into the category of gilding (or glooming) reality, of overdramatizing the humdrum, while Clinton and Jeb Bush sometimes play characters different from who they really are. She: “dead broke” upon leaving the White House. He: a political rebel prepared to disrupt the status quo.
Cruz outperforms either of them, a former college debate whiz who is practiced at instantaneously constructing an argument for an assigned viewpoint that may not be his own.
That skill surely came in handy when he ran for a Senate seat in 2012 and saw that the best lane available to him was marked Tea Party. He became the Tea Party incarnate, turning Washington into a four-letter word: a four-letter word, mind you, that he couldn’t wait to make his second home and use as a stage upon which to strut and preen.
HIS greatest distinction as a lawmaker thus far has been his readiness to pursue lost causes that draw attention from a news media that he supposedly loathes, and to skirmish with party colleagues in a way that similarly puts him front and center on TV and prompts headlines about him.
His storytelling is selective. He talks voluminously about his father’s arrival in Texas from Cuba, presenting a harrowing, inspiring immigration narrative that’s probably not the full truth and glides over [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/us/politics/cuban-peers-dispute-ted-cruzs-fathers-story-of-fighting-for-castro.html ] many oddities and unanswered questions.
He talks less voluminously about his mother and about Canada, which is where she gave birth to him. She’d grown up in Delaware — not exactly the prairie — and gone to college at Rice University, which is sometimes referred to as the Harvard of the South. Not only that, she majored in mathematics. That was hardly the norm for a woman in the 1950s, and it suggests a certain sophistication, even progressiveness.
He emphatically recalls how his father’s embrace of Jesus Christ led him back to his mother — and to him — after his parents had separated.
He tends to skip over the part about his parents eventually divorcing nonetheless. It was his father’s second failed marriage. That detail doesn’t fit Cruz’s moralizing on the subject of holy matrimony. It doesn’t buttress his extravagant lamentations about the tradition-shattering, God-insulting unions of two men or two women.
But then his education and his station in life don’t exactly buttress the disdain he heaps on intellectuals and the affinity he claims with the hourly laborers of the world.
During the most recent debate, he twice disparaged the people in Washington who set monetary policy as haughty, disconnected “philosopher-kings.”
From such cunningly chosen, strategically deployed words, you’d never guess that Cruz was known at Harvard Law School for a reluctance to “study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale,” according to a 2013 profile [ http://www.gq.com/story/ted-cruz-republican-senator-october-2013 (at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=92370817 and preceding and following)] of Cruz in GQ by Jason Zengerle.
One of Cruz’s law-school roommates, Damon Watson, told Zengerle: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”
Good thing Heidi Cruz got her graduate degree in business administration from Harvard. Or bad thing, depending on your view of marriage to Ted Cruz.
He’s big on American exceptionalism. He’s loquacious on American sovereignty. But after that all-night, 21-hour protest of Obamacare — you know, when he stood on the Senate floor and managed to quote country-western lyrics, muse about “Duck Dynasty” and read “Green Eggs and Ham” aloud — he was photographed being driven away in a B.M.W.
What a deluxe chariot for such a down-home guy, but how true to the disparities between his branding and his reality.
He has a pair of favorite cowboy boots, as anyone involved in a masquerade like his must. But they’re not the usual leather. They’re black ostrich skin.
That actually surprises me. I would have expected peacock feathers.
© 2015 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/opinion/sunday/ted-cruzs-laughable-disguise.html
Senator Ted Cruz spoke at the National Religious Liberties Conference in Des Moines on Nov. 6.
Credit Mark Kauzlarich/Reuters
By KATHERINE STEWART
NOV. 16, 2015
EARLIER this month, in Des Moines, the prominent home-schooling advocate and pastor Kevin Swanson again called for [ http://news.yahoo.com/republican-candidates-attend-rally-where-014821801.html ] the punishment of homosexuality by death. To be clear, he added that the time for eliminating America’s gay population was “not yet” at hand. We must wait for the nation to embrace the one true religion, he suggested, and gay people must be allowed to repent and convert.
Mr. Swanson proposed this at the National Religious Liberties Conference, an event he organized. Featured speakers included [ https://freedom2015.org/ ] three Republican contenders for the presidency: the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
Mr. Huckabee later pleaded ignorance [ http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2015/11/12/huckabee-claims-ignorance-on-host-whos-espoused-death-to-homosexuals ]. Yet a quick web search will turn up Mr. Swanson’s references to the demonic power of “the homosexual Borg,” the unmitigated evil of Harry Potter and the Disney character Princess Elsa’s lesbian agenda [ http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-26759342 ].
Mr. Cruz apparently felt little need to make excuses. He was accompanying another of the featured speakers at the conference: his father, Rafael Cruz — a politically connected pastor who told [ http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2013/08/10/rafael-cruz-warns-family-leadership-summit-of-socialist-threat-to-u-s ] a 2013 Family Leadership Summit that same-sex marriage was a government plot to destroy the family.
On Saturday, father and son traveled to Bob Jones University in South Carolina to join a Rally for Religious Liberty. Among the speakers was Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, who has called L.G.B.T. activists “hateful” and “pawns” of the devil.
The comfortable thing to do would be to dismiss Mr. Swanson as just another wombat from the embarrassing fringe of American politics. But that would be a mistake. Mr. Swanson’s murderous imaginings did not interfere with his ability to attract senior Republican figures to his conference, including as a keynote speaker Bob Vander Plaats, an Iowa politician who will grant the “Most Wanted Endorsement of 2016,” according to [ https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2015/08/an-interview-with-the-most-wanted-endorsement-of-2016 ] the Conservative Review.
Mr. Swanson is the product of a significant political movement that has coalesced around the theme of religious liberty. Many of its leaders and their allies appear at the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voters Summit. Other power centers include Liberty University (now a required stop on the campaign trail); conservative policy organizations like the American Family Association and Concerned Women for America; and Christian legal advocacy groups like Liberty Counsel (whose co-founder, Mat Staver, acted [ http://www.advocate.com/religion/2015/10/02/liberty-counsel-claims-vatican-lying-about-popes-kim-davis-meeting ] as Kim Davis’s lawyer) and the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal powerhouse behind the Hobby Lobby decision (whose president, Alan Sears, co-wrote [ http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/05/01/3429448/alliance-defending-freedom/ ] a book in 2003 titled “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today”).
When talking about religious conservatives in America, we might perhaps conjure up an image of a farmer in Iowa or a small-business owner in Ohio who goes to church and holds traditional values. But the leaders to whom such conservatives deliver their votes have a distinct, often different, political vision.
When they hail religious liberty, they do not mean the right to pray and worship with other believers. Instead, the phrase has become a catchall for tactical goals of seeking exemptions from the law on religious grounds. To claim exception from the law as a right of “religious refusal” is, of course, the same as claiming the power to take the law into one’s own hands.
The leaders of this movement are breathtakingly radical. Like Mr. Swanson, they feel persecuted and encircled in a hostile world. Like him, they believe that America will find peace only when all submit to the one true religion.
True, few share Mr. Swanson’s taste for genocidal fantasy. But they do share the ultimate goal of capturing the power of the state and remaking society in ways most Americans would find extreme: a world in which men rule in families, women’s reproductive freedom is curtailed and “Bible believers” run the government.
This movement is a power to be reckoned with in Republican Party politics. Mr. Cruz, for one, is basing his strategy on winning its support. Ben Carson told [ http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2015/11/11/ben-carson-secular-progressives-are-trying-to-push-god-out-of-our-lives/ ] a Liberty University convocation this month of his concern that so many people “are trying to push God out of our lives.” And early this year, Mr. Jindal hosted a religious revival rally on the Louisiana State University campus that was sponsored by the American Family Association.
But the real influence of the movement is in the less visible realm of state legislatures. In 2015 alone, 87 religious refusal-related bills were introduced in 28 states.
All of this raises some unsettling questions about political life in the United States. When presidential candidates court support among the audience of a pastor who openly discusses the extermination of millions of their fellow citizens, why is this not major news?
Most functioning democratic parties in the modern world have mechanisms for marginalizing elements whose presence will ultimately prove destructive to both the political system and the party itself. What has happened to the Republican Party’s immune system?
And why are the rest of us complacent? Because a majority of the public has swung behind same-sex marriage, pundits would have us believe that the culture war is over. The leaders of the religious liberty movement may have lost that fight, but they’re still on the march — crusading through the courts and state legislatures.
It would be foolish to underestimate their resolve.
Katherine Stewart [ http://www.thegoodnewsclub.com/about ] is the author of “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Good-News-Club-Christian/dp/1586488430 ].”
© 2015 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/opinion/campaign-stops/ted-cruz-and-the-anti-gay-pastor.html [with comments]
--
Ted Cruz’s Laughable Disguise
Ben Wiseman
By Frank Bruni
NOV. 14, 2015
THE venerated political strategist David Axelrod once described a presidential campaign as “an M.R.I. for the soul.” It winds up being precisely that.
But in its earliest stages, a presidential campaign is more like a costume ball.
And right now, perhaps no candidate wears a mask as thick as Ted Cruz’s.
He had it on during last week’s debate, when he lashed out at any Republican who gave any ground on illegal immigration.
“The politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande,” he thundered, and there was no mistaking the contempt he meant to communicate for those elite, out-of-touch professionals.
But where does that contempt leave him?
He’s a lawyer, with a degree from Harvard, which was his steppingstone to a conventionally ambitious Supreme Court clerkship.
Where does that contempt leave his wife, Heidi?
She’s a banker, on leave from a job with Goldman Sachs in Houston, where she ran the wealth management unit, which focuses on clients with an average net worth of $40 million.
To hear Cruz talk — or, rather, grandstand — he’s the ultimate outsider, the consummate underdog, in perpetual conflict with the ruling class and in perfect harmony with common folk.
There’s rarely mention of Harvard. Or of Princeton, where he got his college diploma.
There’s rarely mention of his stint [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/30/the-absolutist-2 ] in the policy shop of George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, a dynastic enterprise that was as pure an expression of the Republican establishment’s wishes as could be.
There’s rarely mention of his role in recruiting John Roberts, who would later get a seat on the Supreme Court, to the legal team doing battle for Bush during the 2000 Florida recount. No, that would undercut his rants now about Roberts’s insufficiently pure conservatism as the high court’s chief justice.
It would emphasize how well connected Cruz is. And it would contradict his pose for the presidential race, in which he’s the prairie populist, replete with Western iconography and attire.
The current chapter of the 2016 contest has brought fresh focus to the fibs that candidates tell about themselves, the tweaks they make to their biographies, the misimpressions they promote.
Did Ben Carson really try to stab someone during a rage-filled youth? Was Hillary Clinton sincere about joining the Marines, or is this assertion like that Bosnian sniper fire that she hallucinated?
Embellishment is the order of the day, to a point where you begin to wonder if Brian Williams was less the exception than the rule; if it’s human instinct to aggrandize (and to start believing the aggrandizement); and if success on the scale that most of the presidential contenders have achieved involves especially fanciful myth making, also known as shamelessness.
But the lies aren’t all of the same size, shape and hue. Most of Carson’s fall into the category of gilding (or glooming) reality, of overdramatizing the humdrum, while Clinton and Jeb Bush sometimes play characters different from who they really are. She: “dead broke” upon leaving the White House. He: a political rebel prepared to disrupt the status quo.
Cruz outperforms either of them, a former college debate whiz who is practiced at instantaneously constructing an argument for an assigned viewpoint that may not be his own.
That skill surely came in handy when he ran for a Senate seat in 2012 and saw that the best lane available to him was marked Tea Party. He became the Tea Party incarnate, turning Washington into a four-letter word: a four-letter word, mind you, that he couldn’t wait to make his second home and use as a stage upon which to strut and preen.
HIS greatest distinction as a lawmaker thus far has been his readiness to pursue lost causes that draw attention from a news media that he supposedly loathes, and to skirmish with party colleagues in a way that similarly puts him front and center on TV and prompts headlines about him.
His storytelling is selective. He talks voluminously about his father’s arrival in Texas from Cuba, presenting a harrowing, inspiring immigration narrative that’s probably not the full truth and glides over [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/us/politics/cuban-peers-dispute-ted-cruzs-fathers-story-of-fighting-for-castro.html ] many oddities and unanswered questions.
He talks less voluminously about his mother and about Canada, which is where she gave birth to him. She’d grown up in Delaware — not exactly the prairie — and gone to college at Rice University, which is sometimes referred to as the Harvard of the South. Not only that, she majored in mathematics. That was hardly the norm for a woman in the 1950s, and it suggests a certain sophistication, even progressiveness.
He emphatically recalls how his father’s embrace of Jesus Christ led him back to his mother — and to him — after his parents had separated.
He tends to skip over the part about his parents eventually divorcing nonetheless. It was his father’s second failed marriage. That detail doesn’t fit Cruz’s moralizing on the subject of holy matrimony. It doesn’t buttress his extravagant lamentations about the tradition-shattering, God-insulting unions of two men or two women.
But then his education and his station in life don’t exactly buttress the disdain he heaps on intellectuals and the affinity he claims with the hourly laborers of the world.
During the most recent debate, he twice disparaged the people in Washington who set monetary policy as haughty, disconnected “philosopher-kings.”
From such cunningly chosen, strategically deployed words, you’d never guess that Cruz was known at Harvard Law School for a reluctance to “study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale,” according to a 2013 profile [ http://www.gq.com/story/ted-cruz-republican-senator-october-2013 (at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=92370817 and preceding and following)] of Cruz in GQ by Jason Zengerle.
One of Cruz’s law-school roommates, Damon Watson, told Zengerle: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”
Good thing Heidi Cruz got her graduate degree in business administration from Harvard. Or bad thing, depending on your view of marriage to Ted Cruz.
He’s big on American exceptionalism. He’s loquacious on American sovereignty. But after that all-night, 21-hour protest of Obamacare — you know, when he stood on the Senate floor and managed to quote country-western lyrics, muse about “Duck Dynasty” and read “Green Eggs and Ham” aloud — he was photographed being driven away in a B.M.W.
What a deluxe chariot for such a down-home guy, but how true to the disparities between his branding and his reality.
He has a pair of favorite cowboy boots, as anyone involved in a masquerade like his must. But they’re not the usual leather. They’re black ostrich skin.
That actually surprises me. I would have expected peacock feathers.
© 2015 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/opinion/sunday/ted-cruzs-laughable-disguise.html
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
