Amanda Marcotte has a good take on David Brooks column this morning in which he claims that Ted Cruz is "brutal" and doesn't really represent the Christian Right. He wrong. He does represent it.
And Cruz is not taking that social conservative support for granted one little bit:
Fresh from holding a rally at South Carolina’s Bob Jones University, a school that infamously tried to use “religious liberty” arguments to defend its racist policies, Ted Cruz is now slated to address a “National Security Forum” at self-proclaimed prophet Rick Joyner’s MorningStar Church in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
The Oak Initiative, a conservative group led by Joyner, circulated an email inviting members to the forum over the weekend, which is officially hosted by the South Carolina chapter of Americans for Peace Prosperity and Security and moderated by former Rep. Mike Rogers.
You might think it odd that right wing Christians would hold a "National Security Forum" but it really isn't. They do, after all, have a very pressing concern with the apocalypse:
Joyner doesn’t think America has much time left, telling viewers of his television show “Prophetic Perspective on Current Events” that President Obama’s re-election “could be the end of our republic as we know it” and that a time will come when “our only hope is a military takeover; martial law.”
Joyner cited a prophetic vision he received to predict that the devastating 2011 earthquake in Japan would push America into Nazism, and he has warned that gay marriage will usher in national destruction, a second civil war, divine judgment, a ban on men and women marrying each other and the Mark of the Beast.
He has also boasted of advising several politicians, including one unnamed U.S. senator whom he told that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for homosexuality...[H]e warned that the military’s Jade Helm 15 exercise would usher in martial law and cited the White Horse Prophecy as a reason to believe that God would put Mitt Romney in the White House (although he wonders if Obama, whom he believes is “a wicked man,” stole the 2012 election).
Joyner can also share with Cruz his dreams about the dystopian future of America. It's short. Watch it:
Think about that when you hear Cruz talking about "carpet bombing the Middle East into oblivion" and seeing if we can "make sand glow in the dark."
Nuts like Joyner are Ted Cruz's base, the people with whom he is most aligned. And at this point I think he may have the best shot at winning the GOP nomination. He's no "I was born again one night back in the 80s and don't need to go to church to worship my personal savior" like George W. Bush. Cruz is a committed participant in the life of the extreme religious right.
