Ted Cruz Is Suddenly in Favor of Separation of Church and State?
OK. It makes me really uneasy when Ted Cruz says something that isn’t crazy. What kind of diabolical game is he playing?
Cruz: Excluding Muslims From Presidency Is Unconstitutional.
“You know, the Constitution specifies there shall be no religious test for public office and I am a constitutionalist,” the Texas senator said during the taping of “Iowa Press” at Iowa Public Television.
Cruz was about Ben Carson’s televised statement that Islam is inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution. “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that,” Carson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
So he’s all right with a Muslim being president, huh? Don’t worry, though; he hasn’t given up on anti-Muslim bigotry entirely.
One area in which Cruz did not mind excluding Muslims, however, was from the ranks of refugees from Syria seeking asylum in the United States. He said they should settle in other Middle Eastern countries, citing concerns that some of the purported refugees may actually be terrorists.
“I think the Christians are a very different circumstance because Christians are being persecuted, they are being persecuted directly for their faith and the Obama administration has abandoned Middle East Christians,” Cruz said.
I wonder how Cruz squares his newfound support for the separation of church and state with what he told the American Family Association just last month?
“Nothing is more important in the next 18 months than that the body of Christ rise up and that Christians stand up, that pastors stand up and lead,” Cruz proclaimed. “In this last election, 54 million evangelical Christians stayed home … If we can simply bring Christians to the polls — is it any wonder we have the government we have, we have the leaders we have if believers stay home and leave electing our leaders to unbelievers. We get exactly what we deserve and nothing is more important that having people of faith stand up and just vote our values, vote biblical values and that’s how we turn the country around.”
Because that sounds an awful lot like a “religious test for public office.”
