Freshman Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said in a radio interview Thursday that his “heart weeps” over the advance of same-sex marriage rights in the U.S. and vowed to do everything in his power to stop it.

According to Right Wing Watch, Cruz was appearing on “Washington Watch,” the Family Research Council’s radio show hosted by strident anti-LGBT activist Tony Perkins.

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Cruz told Perkins that President Barack Obama’s administration has been characterized by “abuse of power and lawlessness.” LGBT rights activists, he said, are getting away with too much in this country through their exploitation of the “litigation approach.”

“Our heart weeps for the damage to traditional marriage that has been done,” lamented Cruz.

“We need to stand up and defend traditional marriage and especially do everything we can to prevent the federal government from forcing a different definition of marriage that is contrary to the views to the citizens of each state,” he said.

To this end, he introduced the State Marriage Defense Act on Thursday, a law designed to throw multiple legal and bureaucratic hurdles into the path of same-sex couples seeking to wed and have their marriages recognized.

The government, he insisted, is trying to act quickly to push through marriage equality laws “because there will be pushback from the country when people see the consequences of this redefinition of marriage; they are trying to lock this in quickly hoping that it cannot be reversed.”

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The Family Research Council and Tony Perkins are listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group because of their decades-long mission to spread disinformation about LGBT people and ensure that they remain second class citizens.

“The Family Research Council (FRC) bills itself as ‘the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power,'” said the SPLC website, “but its real specialty is defaming gays and lesbians.”

The website continued, “The FRC often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science. The intention is to denigrate LGBT people in its battles against same-sex marriage, hate crimes laws, anti-bullying programs and the repeal of the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.”