Religious liberty: Ted Cruz’s conservative ‘rocket fuel’

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during the Values Voter Summit, held by the Family Research Council Action on Sept. 25 in Washington. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

To watch Ted Cruz speak at a gathering of religious conservatives in Washington Friday was to more fully grasp why the Republican senator from Texas could win the Iowa caucus next year.

In two words: religious liberty. Cruz has only one rival in the Republican field — former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — who raises the issue as aggressively. But between the two of them, Cruz has a reputation as a fighter, having tangled repeatedly with GOP leadership in Congress on a host of issues since he was elected in 2010. And the grassroots wants a brawler.

Iowa conservatives, who make up a large percentage of caucus-goers, care deeply about the escalating fight over how religious liberty will be defined in America. They were galvanized earlier this month by the jailing of Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples and was held in contempt of court when she forbade other clerks to do so as well.

“It is rocket fuel,” said Bob Vander Plaats, a religious conservative leader from northwest Iowa, who was in D.C. for the annual Values Voter Summit. As Vander Plaats spoke with Yahoo News, Davis herself walked past down a hallway in the Omni Shoreham Hotel, surrounded by an entourage that included two people with small handheld video cameras. Davis, 50, was honored Friday night at the summit with a “Cost of Discipleship Award.”

The two-day Values Voter conference gathered together a number of ordinary Americans who have clashed with gay rights supporters.

Cruz, during a 15-minute speech Friday morning, whipped the audience into a state of nearly constant frenzy. He was most passionate, and the crowd was most exercised, when Cruz said in a thundering voice that he would stand against persecution of people of faith in the U.S.

“The third thing I intend to do on my first day in office is instruct the Department of Justice and the IRS and every other federal agency that the persecution of religious liberty ends today!” he shouted, gesturing vehemently with an index finger pointed down at the ground.

The crowd leapt to its feet and sustained its standing ovation for nearly half a minute. The admiration of the Values Voter attendees for Cruz was most clear in the results of the conference’s straw poll. Cruz won the contest with 35 percent. The closest Republican presidential candidates were retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, with 18 percent, and Huckabee, with 14 percent.

Cruz has sought to appeal to Christian conservatives from the beginning of his presidential campaign. He announced his candidacy at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va, one of the most prominent evangelical colleges in the nation.

The Values Voter Summit, organized by Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council, has been focused on religious freedom for a few years. But the issue has taken on more urgency for religious conservatives after the Supreme Court made gay marriage the law of the land this past summer.

Before the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, there was already a growing list of cases in which Christians had refused to take wedding photographs, bake wedding cakes, or otherwise participate in nuptials involving gay couples. But after Obergefell, county clerks have become the latest battleground, as those who disapprove of gay marriage have refused to issue wedding licenses.

Davis’ is just the most public case, and both Cruz and Huckabee traveled to Kentucky to rally a crowd in her support on the day she was let out of jail. Davis agreed not to prevent other clerks from issuing licenses upon her release.

Incidentally, the Davis case has ended up in exactly the same compromise as conservatives and liberals ended up in Utah, only by a far more contentious route. The legislature in Utah passed a bipartisan law that allows county clerks to opt out of issuing wedding licenses to gays, as long as someone else can be found to perform the duty.

Some conservatives have criticized Davis, saying she went beyond exercising her own rights of conscience when she sought to prevent other clerks from carrying out their lawfully prescribed duties. Many believe she has hurt the cause of religious liberty rather than helping it.

“There was no need for Ms. Davis — or Gov. Huckabee and Sen. Cruz — to elevate this issue into a national fight Christians are destined to lose and, in this case, ought to lose,” wrote Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Institute.

One attendee at the Values Voter conference, Larry Smith, 77, of Newport Beach, Calif., indicated he did not agree with Davis’ attempt to restrain her fellow county clerks from issuing licenses. But he still supported her and viewed the episode as a positive development on the whole.

“She has at least helped us focus on the issue,” Smith said.

Cruz and others like Huckabee know that many evangelicals — whatever their doubts about the details of the Davis case or Davis herself (she has been married four times and divorced three) — view the matter much like Smith does.

These politicians see the Davis case as a way to go on the offense in the debate and, perhaps more importantly, as a way to rally religious conservatives to their presidential candidacies. And this requires that they interpret Davis’ case as the potential fate of every Christian who has moral objections to homosexuality and gay marriage.

“Six months, a year ago, if I had come and said that a Christian woman was going to be thrown in jail, locked up in jail, for living her faith, the media would have dismissed me as ludicrous. That’s where we are,” Cruz said.

Cruz’s adroitness in talking about the fight over religious freedom was in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s cluelessness about the matter. During a rambling 20-minute address, Trump uttered six words about religious freedom, in what amounted to more of a non sequitur than anything.

“You know, freedom of religion, so important. We just don’t see it. You know, you take a look at a thing like the Iran deal,” Trump said, and then digressed into a criticism of the Iran deal, never explaining what the connection was between the two issue.

Trump was also loudly booed by the audience when he called Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., “a clown” and criticized his past support for comprehensive immigration reform.

Kim Bengard, 56, of San Clemente, Calif., dismissed Trump as a pretender among the Christian conservatives and said he displayed no understanding of the fight over religious freedom.

“Trump doesn’t get it. He’s not one of us,” Bengard said. “There wasn’t an excitement. I think the audience was more gracious than he was.”

Trump received only 5 percent in the straw poll voting.

If Trump loses steam — and while he still leads the field he has lost 6 points in the last week — no one is positioned to benefit more from a loss of support for Trump more than Cruz is. Instead of criticizing Trump, he has aligned himself with the businessman, inviting him to a rally at the Capitol earlier this month to protest President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Both Trump and Cruz have taken on Washington and positioned themselves as outsiders. But on religious freedom, the issue that is increasingly important to conservatives, there is a clear contrast between Cruz, the son of an evangelical pastor, and Trump. And it’s a mark of Cruz’s orthodoxy as a conservative versus Trump’s celebrity-based candidacy.

Cruz “is probably the one most people trust to do what he says he would do,” Vander Plaats said.

Before Cruz addressed the Values Voter audience, he attended a press conference organized by the Liberty Institute, a legal group that has defended Christians involved in legal disputes. The group’s leader, Texas attorney Kelly Shackelford, praised Cruz for being involved in religious liberty cases long before his political career.

“Before Sen. Cruz was ever thinking bout running for office … he was one of the best appellate attorneys in the country, and he was donating his time — literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of time — for religious freedom cases,” Shackelford said, noting their work together on legal proceedings around the case of the Mojave Memorial Cross.

Cruz stood with Navy chaplain Wes Modder, who was recently cleared by Navy Personnel Command in a case where he was accused of misconduct for counseling Marines against premarital sex and homosexuality, and with Liz Loverde, a New Jersey college student who said in 2014 that her high school forbade her to create a Christian club.

“These are real people,” Cruz said at the press conference. He spoke of a recent gathering in Iowa that he attended where a crowd of 2,500 heard from nine other individuals in religious liberty disputes. Cruz said the evidence is clear that Christians are being told they cannot exercise their faith.

“For every sneering media reporter who claims there are no threats, look in the eyes of these heroes, one after another after another, who simply stood for their faith and lost their jobs and faced persecution and faced death threats,” Cruz said.

“These threats are real. They’re growing. And yet we will stand and fight to defend our liberty. And I’ll tell you, the worse it gets the more of an awakening you’ll see,” he said.