Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal Pander to Group Call for Execution of Gays

While Bobby Jindal's and Mike Huckabee's appear moribund, that doesn't mean that they aren't still busy prostituting themselves to the most ugly and extreme elements of the Christofascist base of the Republican Party.  The same holds true for Ted Cruz who continues to strike me as a frightening reincarnation of the late Joe McCarthy.  All three of these political whores are set to appear at a conference hosted by a radio host who has repeatedly called for the execution of gays.  As Salon notes, GOP debate moderators need to call out all three of them and force them to acknowledge that they are in bed with those who want to murder law abiding Americans merely because they do not adhere to a hideous form of Christianity.  Here are story highlights:

Republican candidates may want softball questions for the rest of the debate season, but here’s something that the moderators should be confronting at least some of them about: Three candidates—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal—are scheduled to speak this weekend at a conference hosted by a radio host named Kevin Swanson who has openly advocated for putting gay people to death.

The conference is called the National Religious Liberties Conference, and it’s based on the premise that Christians are somehow having their religious liberties stripped from them because they can’t impose their views on others.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen a marked erosion of the religious liberties that were the bedrock of the founding of our country,” Swanson says in a press release promoting the conference.

[A] look over the list of supposedly oppressed Christians that are speaking at the conference shows that the real source of anger is that it’s becoming harder than ever for Christians to oppress others, particularly LGBT people.

For instance, one of the supposedly persecuted Christians is former Air Force Senior Master Sgt. Phillip Monk, who runs around claiming that he was fired from the Air Force for his devout religious beliefs. This is a lie. Monk was supervising a staff sergeant who was supposed to be training recruits and was using his captive audience to proselytize his version of Christianity, particularly pushing his religious beliefs against homosexuality on them. Using your position of authority to push your religion on your underlings is against military rules . . . . In other words, Monk lost his job for refusing to uphold the value of religious liberty. 

Most of the other people labeled “Persecuted Christians” who are speaking at this conference have similar stories: Two anti-gay brothers who believe they are owed a TV show and are somehow persecuted if they don’t get one. A couple who violated anti-discrimination laws by refusing to let a gay couple rent their building to hold a wedding, even though they use their building all the time for straight weddings.  A couple who own a bakery that pulled the “we don’t serve your kind around here” move with a lesbian couple who wanted a wedding cake. An evangelical preacher who feels entitled to have a public high school advertise his church for him. 

Unsurprisingly, Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, is speaking at the conference as well. Rafael Cruz is a completely unhinged radical, so much so that Ted Cruz has sought to distance himself on occasion from his father. But, as Ted Cruz’s participation in this event suggests, he has more in common with his father than not, including the rock solid belief that Christians are somehow being “oppressed” if they can’t impose their views on the unwilling.

Right Wing Watch has more details on the level of hate and mental derangement of the folks that Cruz, Huckabee and Jindal - and by some reports, Ben Carson - seek to prostitute themselves too.  This trio of hate mongers belong in a nut house, not the White House.  When it comes to mindset, these folks are really little different than the extremists of ISIS.