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Progressives Twist Ted Cruz’s Obergefell Criticism Beyond Recognition

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Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) speaks during a press conference in Washington, D.C., April 6, 2022. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)

Cruz expressed the commonly held view that the decision legalizing gay marriage was wrongly decided — but his critics detect something more sinister.

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Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we dissect dishonest narratives about conservatives and the Supreme Court and hit more media misses. 

Tall Tales about Conservatives and the Supreme Court

Last week Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) voiced the commonly held belief that the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the country was wrongly decided — yet popular Twitter personalities twisted his words to tell a more sinister story.

Lawyer Ron Filipkowski shared an 18-second clip of Cruz speaking about the topic with the caption, “Ted says he wants the Supreme Court to overturn the gay marriage decision in Obergefell.”

Yet that is an oversimplification of the senator’s comments on the subject on his podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.

Cruz, asked what the argument would be for overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, replied that the decision, like Roe v. Wade, “ignored two centuries of our nation’s history.”

“Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states,” he said. “We saw states before Obergefell that were moving — some states were moving to allow gay arriage, other states were moving to allow civil partnerships, there were different standards that the states were adopting and had the Court not ruled in Obergefell the democratic process would have continued to operate,” said Cruz.

“If you believe gay marriage is a good idea, the way the Constitution is set up for you to advance that position is to convince your fellow citizens and if you succeeded in convincing your fellow citizens, then your state would change the laws to reflect those views,” he continued. “In Obergefell, the Court said, ‘No, we know better than you guys do,’ and now every state must sanction and permit gay marriage.”

Then Cruz uttered the line that is being cherry-picked by his critics: “I think that decision was clearly wrong when it was decided. It was the court overreaching.”

Yet the senator then went on to note that when the Court considers overturning precedent, it examines reliance interests, or the question of whether people have relied on previous precedent and acted accordingly.

“In the context of marriage, you’ve got a ton of people who have entered into gay marriages and it would be more than a little chaotic for the Court to do something that somehow disrupted those marriages that have been entered into in accordance with the law,” he said. “I think that would be a factor that would counsel restraint that the Court would be concerned about but to be honest I don’t think this Court has any appetite for overturning any of these decisions.”

However, despite Cruz’s level-headed, nothing-new assessment, New York Times senior political reporter Maggie Haberman took Cruz’s comments as cause to suggest that  “The rush to the cultural right in 2024 is going to look very different in this primary than the last two open GOP nomination fights.”

In a poll conducted after the Supreme Court overturned Roe last month, YouGov found that 54 percent of Republicans would like to see Obergefell overturned.

However, despite lack of support for Obergefell, which many Republicans, like Cruz, believe was wrongly decided, gay marriage is overwhelmingly popular with the American public: a May Gallup poll found that a record-high 71 percent of Americans support gay marriage. 

The Cruz saga was just one in a series of smear campaigns against conservatives as it relates to the Court last week: a Slate column suggested Justice Amy Coney Barrett is “in over her head” saying she has “floundered on the intellectual sidelines.”

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes that Barrett came “ill-prepared for many aspects of her job” and that “of all the current justices, Barrett had the least amount of preparation and training for the unique requirements of the job.”

However, as NR’s Dan McLaughlin notes, “Justice Elena Kagan had never been a judge, and Barrett spent more time on the bench than Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Clarence Thomas.” Barrett graduated summa cum laude from Notre Dame Law School, clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and went on to become a federal appeals judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in which she participated in 622 cases and wrote 81 majority opinions, as well as four concurrences and seven dissents — just to name a few resume highlights.

Yet despite Barrett’s demonstrable integrity — and that of her conservative colleagues — pundit Tom Nichols suggested Justices Alito, Thomas and Barrett would “invent a constitutional reason” to uphold state laws preventing women from traveling out of state for abortions, adding that the justices would then “see if two others would be weak-minded enough to go along.”

Headline Fail of the Week

The New York Times ostensibly gathered the opinions of a particular demographic in “‘That’s Between Them and God.’ 12 Pro-Life Voters on Abortion in America.” Read on past the headline, however, to find that the dozen eggs cracked by the Times includes one who told the paper that “when it comes down to abortion, I believe women should have the right. It’s their bodies,” and another who mused that “I feel like the choice should be left up to women. It does take a toll on them, financially, physically, emotionally. So it’s their choice.” There’s a commonly used descriptor for that position, but it’s not pro-life.

Media Misses

–Washington Post columnist Max Boot was called out for his hypocrisy after he wrote a recent column defending President Biden’s recent trip to Saudi Arabia: “Cut Biden some slack. U.S. presidents have to deal with dictators.”

Biden was widely criticized last week after he was seen fist-bumping Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who approved the 2018 operation that killed Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. While Boot advocates for cutting Biden some slack, he was quick to criticize Trump for cozying up with Saudi officials in a 2017 column: “Trump adds the Saudi crown prince to his list of favorite autocrats.”

-A professor of climate and energy policy at UC Santa Barbara tweeted that she is “holding my children and sobbing” because Senator Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) said he won’t support any climate provisions in Democrats’ new economic bill.  

“I don’t know how Manchin will look his own grandchildren in the eyes tonight,” she wrote. “He is condemning them to a broken planet. Shameful doesn’t begin to describe it.”

-Police shot and killed 20-year-old Andrew Sundberg in Minneapolis after he fired on a single mother and her children in their apartment before turning his gun on police officers responding to the scene. The circumstances of Sundberg’s death – and the danger he posed to innocent lives – hasn’t prevented figures like celebrity attorney Ben Crump from trying to stir the racial pot on Twitter.

 

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