Earlier this year, we reported that a handful of right-wing activists in Ohio, including anti-gay activist Linda Harvey of Mission America, had issued a press release announcing their support for Ted Cruz but that these endorsements had not been officially promoted or announced by the Cruz campaign.
That changed yesterday when the Cruz campaign “announced the endorsements of more than 30 key Ohio leaders, including clergy, elected officials, and activists,” including three of the activists we highlighted in our original post: Harvey, Phil Burress of Citizens for Community Values Action and Molly Smith of Cleveland Right to Life.
“I am thrilled to announce such outstanding endorsements from Ohio leaders,” said Cruz. “These are some of Ohio’s top conservative leaders and they add to our incredible list of courageous conservatives from all across the Buckeye State.”
In honor of the Cruz campaign’s announcement, we decided to republish our earlier post in order to remind everyone just whom Cruz is embracing:
Perhaps Harvey thinks that Cruz will be the president she has longed for who will issue “an Emancipation Proclamation … to free America from the tyranny of sodomy.”
Harvey, who is boycotting so many pro-LGBT businesses that she complains she is running out of places to shop, has just this year:
- Claimed that efforts to combat bullying of LGBT young people amount to “sexual abuse.”
- Said that gays “were not born this way, but created through sexual indoctrination” and now want to recruit kids in turn.
- Worried that LGBT youth are possessed by “demonic spirits.”
- Said that gay pride parades are signs of God’s impending judgment on America and “ought to be banned.”
- Backed Jamaica’s law criminalizing homosexuality.
- Said she actually loves gay people, but supporting gay rights is “the least compassionate, the meanest and most hateful thing you can do” because that will “accelerate and confirm this behavior in more and more people in our country.”’
Harvey has also advised parents not to let gay doctors or nurses treat their children, even when they’re hospitalized, and has insisted that “there is no proof that there’s ever anything like a gay, lesbian or bisexual or transgendered child, or teen or human.”
Burress and Smith also have anti-gay records that allow them to fit right in with their fellow Cruz supporters. Burress, whose Citizens for Community Values is the Ohio state affiliate of the Family Research Council, was an influential player in the passage of waves of anti-gay-marriage legislation in the 1990s and early 2000s, although his true passion is fighting against pornography. Smith, the head of Cleveland Right to Life and a leader of the fetal personhood group Personhood Alliance, has clashed with the National Right to Life Committee over her anti-gay activism.
Both Burress and Smith have fought to stop the Republican Party from becoming too friendly to gay people, attacking Ohio Sen. Rob Portman when he came out in favor of marriage equality. Burress, who called Portman “a very troubled man,” urged the senator to put his gay son into ex-gay therapy and later vowed to run a primary challenger against him.
