In an interview with influential social conservative commentator Robert George on the Catholic television network EWTN last month, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said that the president should defy the Supreme Court’s “fundamentally illegitimate” decision striking down bans on same-sex marriage, which he compared to “Nazi decrees.”
George, the co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage and a mentor of Cruz’s, likened the court’s “tragic mistake” in Obergefell to infamous Supreme Court decisions including Dred Scott, asking Cruz, “Was Lincoln right to defy the court on [Dred Scott] and would you, as president, do that with the Obergefell decision?”
“Lincoln was absolutely right, I agree with President Lincoln,” Cruz responded. “And courts do not make law. That is not what a court does. A court interprets the law, a court applies the law, but courts don’t make law.”
Saying that it is “profoundly wrong” to refer to the gay marriage decision as the law of the land, Cruz said, “I think the decision was fundamentally illegitimate, it was lawless, it was not based on the Constitution.”
Cruz then brought up remarks that Justice Anthony Kennedy made recently at Harvard Law School, in which he discussed when it is the duty of public officials to resign rather than carry out laws that they think are unjust, such as in the case of opponents of marriage equality. Kennedy used the extreme example of judges who resigned under Nazi rule, saying that whether they can morally carry out their official duties is “a fair question that officials can and should ask themselves” and that “great respect … ought to be given to people who resign rather than do something they think is morally wrong in order to make a point.”
This, Cruz declared, amounted to Kennedy comparing “the Supreme Court of the United States to the Nazis.”
“This isn’t me calling them the Nazis,” he said, “this is Justice Kennedy calling the court on which he serves, calling the opinion that he wrote, analogizing that to the Nazi decrees that we must obey.”
George interjected: “Just to be clear, surely Justice Kennedy was not embracing Nazism.”
Cruz hesitated and smiled. “He drew the analogy,” he said, “and the obvious implication was just as you were forced to obey the Nazis, you’re forced to obey us as well … even if we are tyrannical and oppressive. Now, look, certainly he wasn’t embracing all of the horrible things the Nazis did but to make that analogy, that is essentially saying, we wear the jackboot and you must obey us.”
