CNN political commentator Margaret Hoover accused Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Monday of “pandering to the bigots” after the senator said states should decide laws on marriage equality.
Hoover pointed out on CNN’s “New Day” that the Texas Republican Party adopted a platform this year that refers to being gay as abnormal and that conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said he wanted to revisit the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2015.
“Let’s just be reminded that Ted Cruz is pandering not just to the base of the Republican Party but to the worst kind of bigotry in the Republican Party,” Hoover argued. “All of this is circular inanity and pandering to the bigots.”
Cruz on Saturday compared Obergefell v. Hodges to Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court overturned last month along with the 50-year constitutional right to abortion.
“Obergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history,” the Texas lawmaker said during an episode of his podcast “Verdict With Ted Cruz.”
He added that marriage laws had always been left to the states and the democratic process, calling the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell “wrong” and “overreaching.”
Cruz also explained there was not a “mass movement” to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges like there was to overturn Roe v. Wade, speculating there was not enough appetite on the court to rescind the case.
In his concurring opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Thomas said he wanted to revisit the right to same-sex marriage as well as the rights to contraception and privacy in the bedroom, drawing swift condemnation from human rights activists and a petition to remove him from the court.
Other Supreme Court justice have not joined his calls. Fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade, said rescinding Roe had no bearing on other precedents.
On Monday, Hoover said Americans should not be “naive” about the Supreme Court’s conservative majority turning its attention to those cases.
Around 77 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, including 55 percent of Republicans, Hoover said, but two-thirds of Americans had supported abortion rights before Roe v. Wade was overturned.
“You can’t be naive when they’re threatening fundamental rights anymore if you thought that nothing would have ever happened to Roe,” she said.