Much of the left is obsessed with the religious right’s supposed obsession with sex. Exhibit number whatever was Amanda Marcotte’s Tuesday piece in Salon about Ted Cruz’s win in Iowa’s Republican caucuses.
Marcotte alleged that Cruz’s supporters in the Hawkeye State featured “a veritable rogue’s gallery of every creepy straight guy who claims he loves Jesus but has his eyes fixed firmly on the crotches of America.” Moreover, she griped that Cruz’s evangelical-driven triumph meant that the GOP “will still have to pay tribute to the nasty crews that use Jesus as a cover to push their lifelong obsession with controlling other people’s sex lives, especially if those people are female or queer.”
The other major topic of the piece was what Marcotte called Cruz’s “Jesus-walks act.” She asserted that Cruz “clawed his way to victory…by implying — well, more than implying — that he’s a religious messiah, a prophet who is the next best thing to the second coming of Jesus.”
From Marcotte’s post (bolding added):
[F]or the religious right, especially the most skin-crawlingly creepy folks in the religious right, Cruz’s edging Donald Trump…represents a huge victory…Unfortunately, the Republican Party will still have to pay tribute to the nasty crews that use Jesus as a cover to push their lifelong obsession with controlling other people’s sex lives, especially if those people are female or queer…
…Cruz clawed his way to victory in Iowa by implying — well, more than implying — that he’s a religious messiah, a prophet who is the next best thing to the second coming of Jesus. While denouncing Barack Obama for his supposed “messiah complex,” Cruz has been suggesting that he is the real deal, and that he will win because “the body of Christ” will “rise up to pull us back from the abyss.”
Cruz has been portraying his campaign, in fact, as a religious war…“Strap on the full armor of God, get ready for the attacks that are coming,” he told supporters, who are treated more like believers, at a campaign stop in Iowa.
Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, has gone even further in suggesting that his son is quite literally God’s emissary sent to turn America into a Christian nation (which tends to be defined as a nation that keeps heavy tabs on what you’re doing with your genitals, instead of one that makes sure there’s enough loaves and fishes for everyone)…
This Jesus-walks act of Ted Cruz’s worked like a charm, as Cruz sucked up a veritable rogue’s gallery of every creepy straight guy who claims he loves Jesus but has his eyes fixed firmly on the crotches of America. As Cruz noted in his victory speech Monday night, Bob Vander Plaats and Rep. Steve King are national co-chairs for his campaign…
If there was one good thing to come out of Trump’s candidacy, it was that his apparent pull with evangelical voters suggested that the single-minded obsession with the underpants of America was finally starting to fade on the right. But the fact that Iowa voters, who are heavily evangelical, broke at the last minute to support the guy who is supported by the sex police shows that we are not quite done with these lunatics.
