It is hard to believe any lawyer, even one who just barely passed the bar exam on the third try, could say something so wrong about Kim Davis. And Cruz was top of his class at Harvard and clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He could not have better credentials. But what he said about Kim Davis is wrong as a matter of fact and law.
Ted Cruz's official statement about Ms. Davis being held in contempt and jailed reads as thus:
Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny. Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith. This is wrong. This is not America.
I call upon every Believer, every Constitutionalist, every lover of liberty to stand with Kim Davis. Stop the persecution now.
Ms. Davis is not exactly the first woman arrested for practicing her Christian faith. It goes back on this continent to at least 1637 when Mary Dyers and others were banished from Massachusetts. Dyers became a Quaker in England, returned to the colonies and was ultimately hanged in Boston for being a Quaker in 1660. Since then Christian men and women have been arrested for advocating anti-slavery, votes for women, civil rights, pacifism, and various other causes. I personally know strong Quaker women who have spent time in jail.
One expects such ignorance from Sarah Palin, but Cruz has no excuse. If he does not know the history of this country, he certainly knows that there are history books where he can find it out. But on the other hand, his followers won't know that his statement is off by 378 years and it is what they want to hear. Truth be damned.
Cruz is showing no respect for the rule of law. The law requires that marriage licenses be signed by the proper official and issued when the requirements are met. Our law does not give officials the power to arbitrarily deny Americans their rights. When Davis denied Americans their rights, the Federal judge had no option under the law he must obey but to hold her in contempt.
And it gets worse. Cruz states that the Federal courts have become illegitimate. It was "the government" that arrested this Christian woman. And we know what conservatives think about "the government". In this case the government is the Federal court system, including the Supreme Court. All Christians, believers in the Constitution, and lovers of liberty should stand against the law of the land as stated by the courts.
Compare this to what Abraham Lincoln said about the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that African-Americans had to have standing to sue in a Federal court. The courts were for white people only.
We think its [the Supreme Court's] decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it . . .
(Emphasis added.)
Lincoln was a real Constitutionalist. The law must be obeyed until it can be changed.
Any lawyer, or citizen for that matter, should know that the first duty of any American is to support and defend the Constitution. Cruz took an oath to do that when he entered the Senate, as did anyone who has served in the military or civil service. Cruz is simply too intelligent and too well educated not to understand the implications of his words. He is willing to trade long term harm to the Constitution for short term advantage to his political campaign. Terrible, absolutely terrible.