Update: Jackson later endorsed Cruz in a statement.
Sen. Ted Cruz continues to woo anti-gay extremists, this time appearing on a conference call for conservative activists organized by E.W. Jackson, the former GOP nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia.
During his run for office, Jackson won notoriety for his remarks about gay people, whom he referred to in one interview with fringe anti-gay leader Peter LaBarbera as “perverted,” “degenerate,” “spiritually darkened” and “frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally.”
As it happens, LaBarbera, the leader of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, was on the call that Jackson organized with Cruz last week and had a chance to ask the Texas Republican about his stance on “the gay agenda.”
LaBarbera asked Cruz how he would reverse the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling and if he would “end Obama’s policy of actually flying the rainbow flag at U.S. embassies worldwide” and oppose “the Equality Act, which I’m calling the Homosexual Superiority Act, in Congress.”
Cruz only answered LaBarbera’s first question about the Obergefell case, railing against the landmark gay marriage decision as “one of the greatest threats to our democracy we had seen in modern times,” and went on to criticize President Obama for being “more interested in promoting homosexuality in the military than he is in defeating our enemy.”
“It is the decision reminiscent of Roe v. Wade of a handful of unelected judges arrogantly and lawlessly decreeing the authority to fundamentally change our country and to tear down the foundations of the country,” Cruz added.
He also criticized Republicans who decided to “surrender” to the Supreme Court and treat Obergefell as the “settled law of the land.”
“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 said, before promoting constitutional amendments to overturn the ruling and put justices up for retention elections, along with legislation “to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over challenges to marriage.”
Cruz conceded that none of his proposals are politically feasible at the moment. Once he is elected president, however, Cruz said he will make sure that “we will not use the federal government to enforce this lawless decision that is a usurpation of the authority of we the people in this country.” He also committed to only appoint Supreme Court justices who would not “legislate from the bench” like the justices did in Obergefell.
Jackson then asked Cruz to address how “the military is beset with these new LGBT rules and I’m just hearing terrible things.” Cruz agreed:
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, you have a commander-in-chief that doesn’t stand up against our enemies, that won’t even acknowledge or say the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ and you have a commander-in-chief that 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.
For example, the military is now focused on trying to promote transgendered [sic] soldiers. The role of the military is not to be some left-wing social experiment. The reason we have the brave men and women who sign up as service men and women to defend this nation is to stand for our values, to protect our safety and security, to protect innocent men and women and to stand up and defeat our enemies, and I would stop the shameless politicizing of our military to push a left-wing agenda that is contrary to the values and contrary to who we are as an American people and a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values.
Later in the conference call, Jackson hailed Cruz as a “real believer” who is “not one of these candidates who is going to say, ‘I believe in traditional marriage but I would attend a gay wedding if it was a friend of mine.’”
Jackson expressed confidence 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.”
The military, Jackson said, is now only focused on “sexual nonsense that the left thinks is so very important,” warning that “even some of these Republicans, I think they would just leave it as is because, as he said, some of them say, ‘Oh, it’s federal law, it’s over, it’s done with and we just need to move on.’”
“How are we going to move on and be prosperous as a nation if we are spitting in the face of Almighty God? And that is exactly what this whole homosexual, same-sex, transgender stuff has done,” Jackson said. “It is spitting in the face of Almighty God. And sooner or later, people are going to have to answer for it.”
“There will be a price to pay for that kind of rank rebellion because the Bible is true,” he added. “Ted Cruz understands that.”
Ironically, Jackson denied making similar remarks during his unsuccessful campaign for statewide office in Virginia.
