News of a sex scandal is being dumped on the Ted Cruz for President campaign this morning. Anthony Bennett at Heavy.com has accused Ted Cruz of having recent sexual affairs with five women, including Katrina Pierson, Sarah Isgur Flores and Amanda Carpenter – and two other women that no one else has identified. This information is being spread by surrogates of the Donald Trump campaign based on sources at Twitter and the National Enquirer.
Yes, Bennett actually cites Twitter and the National Enquirer as sources in this story. “Twitter and the National Enquirer claim to have a key piece of context,” he writes.
Twitter, the company, actually isn’t claiming anything about Ted Cruz’s sex life. When Anthony Bennett cites Twitter as a source, it tells you something about the quality of this supposed sex scandal. All Bennett is really able to say is that a bunch of people who have social media accounts over on Twitter have said that they think Ted Cruz is having sexual affairs. These people could be your neighbor, your mother-in-law, or that strange guy down the street who flies the Confederate battle flag from his front porch.
Oh, but the National Enquirer claims to have inside D.C. sources… that are completely anonymous, and thus, not completely real. The Enquirer writes, “‘Private detectives are digging into at least five affairs Ted Cruz supposedly had,’ claimed a Washington insider.”
Readers who have just an ounce of critical thinking skill will notice that the Enquirer isn’t even claiming that its secret-and-perhaps-pretend source has evidence of any sexual affair involving Ted Cruz. It’s merely asserting that some private investigators are looking around to see if they can find any evidence of any sexual affair that might have happened.
With this thin thread of second hand anonymous allegations of private detectives looking for evidence of sexual affairs, the sex scandal news wouldn’t have grounds for belief if it was published on the front page of the New York Times. But, that’s not where it’s coming from. The National Enquirer is a supermarket tabloid that’s infamous for making up completely false stories involving famous people. One recent headline read, “Kurt Cobain was murdered – with this shotgun! Secret recordings reveal a motive to have the Nirvana rocker killed!” With content like this, the credibility of the National Enquirer is about as low as it gets.
But, let’s say that the story is true. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that Ted Cruz did have sex with five different women who are not his wife.
So what? Ted Cruz isn’t campaigning to be elected the Husband of the USA. He’s campaigning to be elected President of the USA, and that’s not a job that requires any particular sexual behavior. The job of the President is to run the federal government, not to be a national exemplar of sexual mores.
There’s a flip side to this story, though. Just as the kind of sex Ted Cruz chooses to have, and the people he chooses to have sex with, are not relevant to the job he seeks to do as President of the United States, the holier-than-thou pose of of Christian superiority that Cruz has campaigned with is irrelevant as well.
This week, Ted Cruz issued a 15 point-plan for imposing Christian religious beliefs and practices on the entire nation. It includes strict government controls on Americans’ sex lives through the following policies:
- “Issue an Executive Order protecting persons from discrimination by the federal government on the basis of their view that marriage is between a man and a woman.”
- “Rescind Executive Order 13672, which had… required certain federal contractors to not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”
- “Direct all federal agencies to stop interpreting “sex” to include “sexual orientation” and/or “gender identity” where the term “sex” refers to a protected class in federal law. Prioritize this effort at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Housing and Urban Development.”
- “Direct HHS to exempt entirely all employers who object for moral or religious reasons to the contraception mandate.”
The bottom line translation of these items is that Ted Cruz wants to give the federal government the role of deciding who Americans should have sex with, and under what circumstances Americans can become pregnant. Ted Cruz also regularly pushes for the U.S. federal government to be given the power to impose “Judeo-Christian values” on everyone, whether they’re Jewish, Christian, or someone else.
So, when Ted Cruz issued this plan for government mandated sexual purity, he was engaging in just the kind of intrusion of personal business into public politics that the purveyors of #CruzSexScandal are playing with now. The only difference is who is being targeted.
Before, Ted Cruz campaigned to use the power of the federal government to control people’s private lives, including big government regulation of people’s sex lives. Now, Ted Cruz is the one who finds his private sex life targeted by the Republican morality police.
In both cases, the invasion of privacy is wrong. In both cases, the Republicans aren’t likely to give it up any time soon.
