It looks like it is “Bag On Ted Cruz Week” here at the seminary. He thinks so much of himself that I can’t help thinking about him sometimes. Mostly I think he’s an incompetent gasbag, trying to dog-whistle his way to the White House. Last week, he had a lot to say in Iowa about gay marriage. Now I have to give an ounce of credit to Cruz here-when the radio host he talked to brought up nullification as a means to fight it, Cruz demurred. But Ted hasn’t found a pile of shit he can’t help stepping in, and has another brilliant way to stop the gay brigade from messing with marriage:
Sen. Ted Cruz told Iowa talk radio host Jan Mickelson yesterday that he plans to introduce a constitutional amendment to allow states to ban gay and lesbian couples from marrying because court decisions in favor of marriage equality present “a real danger to our liberty.”
“If the courts were following the Constitution, we shouldn’t need a new amendment, but they are, as you put it quite rightly, making it up right now and it’s a real danger to our liberty,” he said.
Cruz, R-Texas, described the ongoing shift toward legal recognition for gay couples as an “unrelenting assault on traditional marriage,” and castigated judges who have struck down prohibitions for “ignoring their oaths, ignoring the Constitution and legislating from the bench.”
Open questions for opponents of gay marriage: what’s unconstitutional about it? Last I checked, the Fourteenth Amendment promises equal protection under the law for all. How does it deny liberty? They never really get into that. And what does legislating from the bench mean? Has he not heard of Marbury v. Madison, or the simple concept of judicial review? (Of course he has. He’s a fucking lawyer.)
The Constitution gives freedoms and frames the way the government works. Only once has it been used to take rights away-by the temperance movement. It worked so well, they had to create another amendment to undo it. It is not a special space or hidey-hole.