Whether he’s engaging in effective dialog with Canadian actresses or American radicals, defending religious liberty, calling out climate change hysterics, taking on the progressive media, challenging GOP leadership, or playfully pushing back against Obama’s gun control agenda, Ted Cruz has a way of tackling, head on and without fear, issues that either trip up other Republicans or that they avoid like the plague.

This week, Cruz countered the Democrat accusation that the GOP is engaged in a “war on women” by asserting that the GOP is not “the condom police.”

CNN reports:

Iowans at a town hall waded into awkward territory on Monday evening as Ted Cruz tackled a question on contraceptives. During a question and answer session at the final stop of a three-day Iowa campaign swing, an attendee asked Cruz about “making contraception available to women who want to control their own bodies.”

The Texas senator began by attacking what he called the Democratic Party’s “(concocted) war on women” and accused Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton of falsely attacking the GOP as “the condom police.” “Hillary Clinton embraces abortion on demand in all circumstances up until the moment of birth. Partial-birth abortion with taxpayer funding, with no notification for parents in any circumstances — 91% of Americans say that’s nuts,” he said. “So what do they do, they try to shift it. The war on women wasn’t that, it was contraceptives. Now listen, I have been a conservative my entire life. I have never met anybody, any conservative who wants to ban contraceptives.”

Cruz said the charge that conservatives are anti-contraceptives is a “made-up, nonsense example.”

While CNN calls a discussion of birth control “awkward” (an interesting switch from their enthusiastic support for Planned Parenthood), the audience clearly didn’t find the situation awkward at all. They appear to be laughing quite heartily at the absurdity of the Democrats’ demagoguery over “women’s health.”

Watch:

The part that caused the laughter is reported in the CNN article as follows:

“As I noted, Heidi and I, we have two little girls. I’m very glad we don’t have 17,” he told the hundreds of people in the audience. “And it’s a great example when the war on women came up, Republicans would curl up in a ball, they’d say, ‘Don’t hurt me.’ Jiminy Cricket!” “Last I checked we don’t have a rubber shortage in America. When I was in college we had a machine in the bathroom, you put .50 cents in and voila!” Cruz continued, receiving some uncomfortable laughter from the audience. “So yes, anyone who wants contraceptives can access them, but it’s an utterly made-up nonsense issue.”

I’m not so sure the laughter is “uncomfortable”; people who are laughing in an uncomfortable manner don’t tend to burst into spontaneous applause.

As Jazz Shaw writing at Hot Air explains, Cruz is correct that Democrats use this issue—contorted, distorted, and often completely fabricated—to rally support against the GOP who, Democrat voters are led to believe, will abolish contraceptives.

Shaw writes:

The contraceptive issue is one which is entirely made up when it come to accessibility, but the Democrats love to conflate two entirely different questions in their lines of attack. First of all, Americans are not opposed to the availability and use of contraception in various forms. The vast majority use or have used one type of contraception or another, with 90% (and even 82% of Catholics) saying it’s “morally acceptable” and a staggering 70% even support making the pill available over the counter rather than by prescription. The idea of regulating condoms doesn’t even register in public surveys because it’s a silly idea. Where Republicans and Democrats disagree is on the idea that – as with most things – the federal government should be able to mandate that an employer provide contraception coverage to their employees. This isn’t even an issue for the vast majority of employers, but it quickly becomes one when that “employer” happens to be a religious organization like the Little Sisters of the Poor. (It won’t come as much of a surprise if the Nuns are among the 18% of Catholics who oppose contraception.)

In 2012, Joe Biden made the outrageous claim that Mitt Romney would “put ya’ll back in chains.” While Romney said the comment was outrageous, he didn’t seem capable of defending conservative values that would actually “unchain” Americans or of addressing the absurd implication that Republicans are not only racist but eager to reinstate slavery. Perhaps it seemed too absurd to him, but as Cruz clearly realizes, there are many people who vote for Democrats who actually believe this sort of nonsense.

Hopefully, Cruz will continue to address, directly and fearlessly, the phony Republican “war on women” and other issues that Democrats use to demonize and marginalize conservatives and Republicans.



