Ted Cruz’s Michigan Co-Chair Wants To Ban Homosexuality

Cruz and anti-gay zealot Gary Glenn

With Marco Rubio's candidacy in an apparent death spiral and Donald Trump still in the delegate count lead, Ted Cruz is seemingly cranking up his anti-gay extremism in advance of the Michigan primary by announcing the appointment of an anti-gay extremist, GOP state representative Gay Glenn as one of his Michigan co-chairs.  Glenn not only wants to roll back gay rights, but wants to criminalize homosexuality.   That Cruz continues to surround view an even scarier  himself with and pander to such hate-filled religious extremists makes him, in my view, an even more frightening prospect in the White House than Donald Trump.  Here are details from Think Progress:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has made no bones about his opposition to marriage equality throughout his presidential campaign, but the newly announced legislative co-chair of his Michigan campaign takes things a step further.

Republican Michigan state Rep. Gary Glenn — one of nine Cruz legislative co-chairs in the Wolverine State — has said he believes being gay should be a crime.

During a 2011 interview, Glenn, who also serves as the president of the American Family Association of Michigan, was asked if he supported criminalizing homosexuality. “The short answer to your question is yes, we believe that states should be free to regulate and prohibit behavior that’s a violation of community standards and a proven threat to public health and safety — including, as most of the United States did throughout its history, homosexual behavior,” he said.

Glenn has a long history of harboring anti-LGBT views. . . . . Last year, Glenn spoke out against a Planet Fitness policy that resulted in a Midland, Michigan woman having her membership cancelled after she spent several days complaining about a transgender woman she saw using the bathroom at her gym.

“Planet Fitness obviously should rethink its anti-woman, anti-reality policy,” Glenn said. “If they don’t, they shouldn’t be surprised in a conservative family-friendly community such as Midland if they lose more female members.”

In a statement announcing Glenn’s status as a legislative co-chair of his campaign, Cruz said he’s “thrilled to announce the addition of such outstanding conservative legislators to our Michigan leadership team.”

“These courageous conservatives are coalescing behind our campaign because the people of Michigan are tired of career politicians in Washington and want someone who has a record of fighting for our values and the Constitution,” he added. 

Polling released today shows Cruz in second place in the Republican field in Michigan, 13 points behind frontrunner Donald Trump.

Quarantines for AIDS Victims: The Mike Huckabee You May Not Remember

Yesterday one of the foulest of GOP presidential candidates formally announced his candidacy: Mike Huckabee.  While he tried to come off as folksy and concerned about average Americans, he had total amnesia as to how those same Americans have come to find themselves in financial straits: failed GOP policies, George W. Bush/Dick Cheney's unfunded wars, and unfettered Wall Street greed that the GOP endorsed.  Huckabee - at least from the portions of his speech that I heard - tried to stay away from "social issues" but it is important to remember that his views have not changed and that he has not "evolved" whatsoever.  A piece in Mother Jones reminds us what Huckabee is really all about.  Here are highlights:

Mike Huckabee . . . . . launched his second bid for the White House in his hometown of Hope, Arkansas, vowing to stop the "slaughter" of abortion and calling for the protection of the "laws of nature" from the "the false God of judicial supremacy." 

Huckabee is joining a GOP field that's bigger and more competitive than the one he out-hustled to win the Iowa caucuses seven years ago. The Christian conservatives who flocked to the former Baptist preacher in 2008 can now turn toward other evangelical-minded candidates in the GOP presidential race.

Since dropping out of the 2008 race, he's flaunted a more combative, occasionally conspiratorial brand of politics—flirting with birtherism, advising prospective enlistees to avoid joining the armed forces until President Barack Obama has left office, and, just last month, warning social conservatives that the United States is "moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity."

Huckabee is staying true to the kinds of red-meat issues he first entered politics to promote, in a long-shot 1992 bid for Senate against Democratic incumbent Dale Bumpers.

Huckabee, then a Baptist pastor who operated a small television station out of his Arkadelphia church, made sex and morality the centerpieces of his '92 campaign—and he preached as fiery a message from the stump as he did from the pulpit. The novice politician let loose with eyebrow-raising tirades that occasionally put him to the right of the most fire-breathing conservatives. He endorsed quarantining AIDS patients, condemned efforts to shield homosexuals from discrimination, and called for the death penalty to be imposed on big-time drug dealers.

He endorsed quarantining AIDS patients from the rest of society—a radical view even among conservatives at the time—while arguing that the severity of the epidemic had been exaggerated because gay people wielded so much political clout. The federal government should spend less money on AIDS, he insisted, and more on diseases that the afflicted had not brought on themselves, such as cancer.

He attacked his opponent for supporting the Americans with Disabilities Act (because it included protections for AIDS patients) and a 1991 civil rights bill that would have prohibited housing discrimination based on sexual orientation.

According to Huckabee, being gay wasn't just a sin—it should be a criminal offense. . . .
calling for enforcement of state sodomy laws," which made gay sex a felony "crime against nature" in many states.

"I think he's the same guy who started out," says Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times, who covered the 1992 race. "He's got a penchant for sort of cheap-shot quips. He thinks a lot of himself. He thinks he can talk himself out of anything. The main thing I still marvel at is how many people think he's a nice guy, because he's got a real mean streak."

But at this point, after spending the years since the 2008 election feeding red meat to his base, the tapes may not even matter much. In just the last six months, he's urged states to ignore a possible Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage and attacked Jay-Z for "arguably  crossing the line from husband to pimp by exploiting his wife [Beyonce] as a sex object." Researchers won't have to scour church basements for dusty VHS cassettes containing his stem-winding sermons. They can just turn on the television.

The man was and remains an extremist.  One can only hope that the mainstream media will get off its lazy ass and expose Huckabee for the foul individual that he is.