Just weeks after praising Planned Parenthood supporter Rosa Parks, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has sent a letter [PDF] to the National Portrait Gallery demanding that the Smithsonian museum remove a bust of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger from its “Struggle for Justice” exhibit, which features well-known leaders of social movements.

Cruz, in a letter drafted with Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and joined by two dozen House Republicans, tells the gallery’s director that the presence of the bust “is an affront both to basic human decency and the very meaning of justice.” After citing the discredited claim that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue for profit, the group then badly twists a Sanger quote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

In Sanger’s letter, which you can find here, she was saying that she wanted black leaders to join her effort to promote birth control access because she was afraid that opponents would disseminate such unfounded rumors, which is ironically exactly what Cruz and Gohmert did with their letter.

While Sanger was a believer in eugenics, so were many leaders of her time, including Winston Churchill. Ironically, Cruz consistently says on the stump that one of his first acts as president would be putting a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. (The Obama administration’s decision not to hold onto a Churchill bust that the British government had temporarily loaned to George W. Bush has become a frequent point of attack from the Right, despite the fact that there is another Churchill bust still in the White House residence.)

Nevertheless, Cruz and Gohmert go on to say that Sanger’s “racist views have had a very real and devastating impact on the widespread destruction of unborn human life — especially in minority communities.”

The signers include anti-choice stalwarts Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who is slated to chair a House special committee targeting Planned Parenthood.

The letter appears to be part of a larger campaign launched by extremist pastor E.W. Jackson to remove the bust from the gallery. Jackson said that Sanger’s presence in the gallery would dishonor civil rights leaders like Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. However, like Parks, King was a supporter of Planned Parenthood and praised Margaret Sanger for her “courage and vision.”