Ted Cruz: Republicans are not “the condom police”
Takes on the supposed “War on Women”
Whether he’s engaging in effective dialog with Canadian actresses or American radicals, defending religious liberty, calling out climate change hysterics, taking on the progressive media, challenging GOP leadership, or playfully pushing back against Obama’s gun control agenda, Ted Cruz has a way of tackling, head on and without fear, issues that either trip up other Republicans or that they avoid like the plague.
This week, Cruz countered the Democrat accusation that the GOP is engaged in a “war on women” by asserting that the GOP is not “the condom police.”
Iowans at a town hall waded into awkward territory on Monday evening as Ted Cruz tackled a question on contraceptives.
During a question and answer session at the final stop of a three-day Iowa campaign swing, an attendee asked Cruz about “making contraception available to women who want to control their own bodies.”
The Texas senator began by attacking what he called the Democratic Party’s “(concocted) war on women” and accused Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton of falsely attacking the GOP as “the condom police.”“Hillary Clinton embraces abortion on demand in all circumstances up until the moment of birth. Partial-birth abortion with taxpayer funding, with no notification for parents in any circumstances — 91% of Americans say that’s nuts,” he said. “So what do they do, they try to shift it. The war on women wasn’t that, it was contraceptives. Now listen, I have been a conservative my entire life. I have never met anybody, any conservative who wants to ban contraceptives.”
Cruz said the charge that conservatives are anti-contraceptives is a “made-up, nonsense example.”
While CNN calls a discussion of birth control “awkward” (an interesting switch from their enthusiastic support for Planned Parenthood), the audience clearly didn’t find the situation awkward at all. They appear to be laughing quite heartily at the absurdity of the Democrats’ demagoguery over “women’s health.”
Watch:
The part that caused the laughter is reported in the CNN article as follows:
“As I noted, Heidi and I, we have two little girls. I’m very glad we don’t have 17,” he told the hundreds of people in the audience. “And it’s a great example when the war on women came up, Republicans would curl up in a ball, they’d say, ‘Don’t hurt me.’ Jiminy Cricket!”
“Last I checked we don’t have a rubber shortage in America. When I was in college we had a machine in the bathroom, you put .50 cents in and voila!” Cruz continued, receiving some uncomfortable laughter from the audience. “So yes, anyone who wants contraceptives can access them, but it’s an utterly made-up nonsense issue.”
I’m not so sure the laughter is “uncomfortable”; people who are laughing in an uncomfortable manner don’t tend to burst into spontaneous applause.
As Jazz Shaw writing at Hot Air explains, Cruz is correct that Democrats use this issue—contorted, distorted, and often completely fabricated—to rally support against the GOP who, Democrat voters are led to believe, will abolish contraceptives.
Shaw writes:
The contraceptive issue is one which is entirely made up when it come to accessibility, but the Democrats love to conflate two entirely different questions in their lines of attack. First of all, Americans are not opposed to the availability and use of contraception in various forms. The vast majority use or have used one type of contraception or another, with 90% (and even 82% of Catholics) saying it’s “morally acceptable” and a staggering 70% even support making the pill available over the counter rather than by prescription. The idea of regulating condoms doesn’t even register in public surveys because it’s a silly idea.
Where Republicans and Democrats disagree is on the idea that – as with most things – the federal government should be able to mandate that an employer provide contraception coverage to their employees. This isn’t even an issue for the vast majority of employers, but it quickly becomes one when that “employer” happens to be a religious organization like the Little Sisters of the Poor. (It won’t come as much of a surprise if the Nuns are among the 18% of Catholics who oppose contraception.)
In 2012, Joe Biden made the outrageous claim that Mitt Romney would “put ya’ll back in chains.” While Romney said the comment was outrageous, he didn’t seem capable of defending conservative values that would actually “unchain” Americans or of addressing the absurd implication that Republicans are not only racist but eager to reinstate slavery. Perhaps it seemed too absurd to him, but as Cruz clearly realizes, there are many people who vote for Democrats who actually believe this sort of nonsense.
Hopefully, Cruz will continue to address, directly and fearlessly, the phony Republican “war on women” and other issues that Democrats use to demonize and marginalize conservatives and Republicans.
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Comments
It is play # 1 in the Democrat playbook. If you oppose a federal program that supposedly helps X then you are anti- X. Never mind that its not the feds’ function to help X. It works because the concept of federalism is lost on most people and they have been conditioned to expect the government must “do something” whenever a problem, real or imagined, occurs.
“Never mind that its not the feds’ function to help X.”
Or never mind that the federal program actually ends up harming X.
A war takes at least two to tango…
The Left’s “war on women” rules of engagement are defined by how easy it is to be able to spread your legs at will and to do so without moral reckoning or the inconvenient consequences of choice.
The left seems to believe that if you hold women and minorities accountable for the choices they willingly make, you’re attacking them. Apparently they feel women and minorities are too incompetent to take responsibility for their own actions.
And they claim the right is racist/bigoted/misogynistic?
This video shows a playful, humorous side of Ted Cruz that I personally had not seen before. I like it. I know that he’s very smart, an excellent debater and a real conservative. Now I know he has a sense of humor too. Maybe I should quit pouting about Scott Walker and take another look at Cruz. Trouble is I’ve been hearing, like forever, that Ted Cruz is not electable because he, personally, a Junior Senator shut down the government. Damn if he’s that strong, maybe he deserves another look.
I felt the same when I saw this video, I would advise him to have more spontaneous moments like this. Plus it was a great comeback to the ridiculousness of the whole matter. I heard the Morning Joe jokers having a good ol’ laugh over it, making fun of him, etc. Such elitist snobs, they are.
This video shows a playful, humorous side of Ted Cruz that I personally had not seen before.
On reflection, don’t most of our views of Cruz arrive via videos in the news? Liberal media hate him, and may go to some lengths to prevent viewers from discovering that he has an attractive side, besides ability to make good arguments spontaneously without Teleprompter.
Cruz would make a good candidate because he is Fearless and Articulate.
As opposed to Clinton, who is Feckless and Artificial?
And clean.
Don’t forget clean.
The power of words — of a single word. “Uncomfortable.” How many uninformed people — liberals or even undecided voters — reading this interpret the word as a signal that either Cruz was insincere in his phrasing as indicated by the “uncomfort” or that the audience really does hate women and wants to ban contraceptives and so was made “uncomfortable.” The NY Times does this constantly, peppering “straight news” stories with loaded subjective words and terms to validate prejudice and inflame stereotypes in the reader. I think they go to a special internship school to learn this.
The media is the issue, the problem, the enemy.
The pop-over ad that covers the entire video is damned unwelcome. Get on the case, PJ Media, and fix that.
This answer of Ted Cruz’s is exactly why Ted Cruz will not defeat the Democrats and why he will not do any better than Romney’s 29% of the Single Female Vote.
He’s answering a rhetoical accusation that Republicans are trying to conscript vaginas with facts and logic.
Even Responding to the question dignifies the question! Responding to this with facts and logic implies that the accusers are somehow factual and logical. Plus, Ted Cruz additionally repeats the imagery for the viewer to emotionally process.
Aristotle said that there are two types of argument: Rhetoric (appeals to emotion) and Dialectic (facts and logic, forget for a second that Marx and Hegel used this word to mean something else).
The point is that Rhetoric (appeals to emotion) will always defeat Dialectic (facts and logic) when all of the premises are not shared and understand by the crowd. The Facts and Logic speaker cannot both argue and instruct and win.
The correct response to War on Women rhetorical accusations is to respond with rhetoric, such as to personally attack or insult the speaker. Somebody who is not interested in facts and logic doesn’t deserve a facts and logic response.
The correct response to Rhetoric is to demonstrate strength and leadership qualities.
Ted Cruz is a lawyer not a leader. Rhetorically he is a disaster.
What works in oral Argument before a fully briefed Supreme Court doesn’t work before the uneducated masses.
(And I’ll end this comment by noting that American IQ is down about 8 points since 1960, so trying to win by being highbrow is a losing strategy evenmoreso these days).
You make some excellent points. It deserves a thread unto itself. I agree with some of your premise, but might disagree with your conclusions about Cruz’s strategy and its effectiveness.
The laughter was not awkward at all. The audience was tickled by Cruz’s implied boast of sexual virility when he says he and Heidi would have 17 kids instead of 2 if it were not for birth control. It’s just been so long since progressive journalists listened to sexual humor that wasn’t raw, uncut, and dirty, they don’t get the joke.