Ted and Rafael Cruz: Like Frightening Father, Like Scary Son.
Extremist antigay preacher Rafael Cruz groomed his son for the presidency since the age of 9 — and now Ted Cruz is ready to put his father’s hateful views into practice. (AP Photo)
Ted Cruz is bad enough all on his own. If Cruz is elected, however, it will be a two-for-one deal. The devil and hellfire Daddy Cruz goes right with him.
If you follow politics at all, you probably know Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz’s major issue stances — he’s anti-LGBT equality, anti-abortion rights, a proponent of free-market economics and an aggressive foreign policy.
But to really kow Cruz’s worldview, it’s important to know his father, mentor, and top campaign surrogate, 76-year-old Rev. Rafael Cruz.
“Rafael Cruz is an extremist,” Chuck Smith, CEO of Equality Texas, tells The Advocate. “He is the senator’s role model. Rafael Cruz spoke at the World Congress of Families event in Utah with a gay-bashing lineup of hateful speakers, and he is Ted’s surrogate traveling across the country on the campaign trail bashing gay people. Like father, like son.”
And the elder Cruz, who hit the campaign trail extensively in Ted’s successful run for U.S. senator from Texas in 2012 and is doing so now in his presidential effort, says the things his son — or almost any politician — can’t get away with.
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Among Rafael Cruz’s other antigay greatest hits: At the World Congress of Families event last November, he said gay people want to legalize pedophilia, starting with an effort to strike down age-of-consent laws. Indeed, he has frequently described LGBT people as sexual predators. He has also said marriage equality is part of a government plot to “destroy the concept of God” and establish socialism in the United States.
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The lack of distance between father and son shows how dangerous a Ted Cruz presidency would be, Smith tells The Advocate. He “lets his father say all the fiery gay-bashing rhetoric, but Ted Cruz will implement that rhetoric in his policies and appointments,” Smith says. “He is the worst candidate in the race, and I have no doubt he will discriminate against gay and transgender people all over the United States if he is elected president.”
The idea that in the near future we may be using the term ‘President Trump’ bothers and worries me. But, then again we have had grossly incompetent and egotistical presidents. W comes to mind. And, for sure, it was terrible and caused messy and expensive problems that, even after eight years of effort, we have not been able to mop up. The mental image of a black man with a mop cleaning up after a spoiled rich kid is entirely appropriate. It was bad. But slowly things have been getting cleaned up so I think we can say we lived through it.
Trump worries me. Cruz scares me. We have lived through egotism and incompetence. But, so far, we have not had a president steeped in evangelical fundamentalism and committed to Christian Dominionism. A man who not only seeks to remove any separation of church and state, but one who simply thinks that there never was any separation between church and state. Cruz is, in a word, is promoting theocracy. He promotes the systematic and mandatory subordination of all civil laws to Biblical norms as interpreted by the fundamentalist evangelical church.
As context for how Ted Cruz thinks it might be good to reference Raphael Cruz, Ted’s father. A mathematician he was making good money in Canada analyzing seismic date for oil companies. As the story goes, when the market for his services went south Raphael started drinking. For some time he was estranged from his wife and child. Only after finding Jesus and cleaning up did he reconcile with his family. As a reformed alcoholic I can tell you there is a tendency for drunks to throw themselves into causes body and soul. Moderation and perspective don’t come naturally to your average drunk. Raphael has gone for the hardest and most uncompromising fundamentalist evangelical message available and done so with a passion that only a confirmed addictive personality can achieve.
Ted has been spoon fed this passion from an early age. He is simplemindedly smart, ruthless, and shameless in pursuit of his fathers vision of the US as a Christian theocracy. That scares me.
When I think of Ted Cruz, the name “Nehemiah Scudder” leaps to mind….
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