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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Defending Your Dad

Did you see the bizarre video of Sen. Ted Cruz’s angry preacher father, Rafael, calling evolution a communist plot, and more? It’s highly cringeworthy, and I’m sure it’s going to get lots of play if Cruz runs for president. Andrew Sullivan already called him “Ted Cruz’s Jeremiah Wright.” No, that’s incorrect. Barack Obama chose to make […]

Did you see the bizarre video of Sen. Ted Cruz’s angry preacher father, Rafael, calling evolution a communist plot, and more? It’s highly cringeworthy, and I’m sure it’s going to get lots of play if Cruz runs for president. Andrew Sullivan already called him “Ted Cruz’s Jeremiah Wright.” No, that’s incorrect. Barack Obama chose to make Jeremiah Wright a father figure to him. Rafael Cruz is Ted Cruz’s father. Still, that’s quite a spectacle for the senator to have to explain.

I wish the media would leave Ted Cruz alone about this stuff. I hate for anyone to be put in the position of having to denounce, or even to criticize, their father or mother in public. It seems to me to be almost a defilement. Mel Gibson’s father Hutton is a malicious, Jew-hating crank, and Gibson is himself an anti-Semite, as we learned definitively in 2006, when he made anti-Jewish slurs to cops who stopped him for drunk driving. But back during the Passion Of The Christ days, I thought it was offensive for the media to put Gibson in the position of having to defend or to denounce his father. (I’m thinking in particular about a Diane Sawyer interview in which Mel Gibson got hot and said, “Don’t go there, Diane.”)

I think it’s fair for reporters to ask Cruz, or any other public figure, to what extent they agree or disagree with their father’s (or mother’s) publicly stated views. But that’s about as far as I’ll go. I know that my parents and I disagree over certain political topics — is there anybody who agrees 100 percent with their parents about anything? — but as a matter of respect, I would never put either of them down in public, and I am sure they would treat me the same way.  There is something sacred in the family bond that should not be traduced in this way.

Bottom line: hold Ted Cruz responsible for Ted Cruz’s views, not his father’s.

UPDATE: Many readers have pointed out that Ted Cruz has involved his father in his campaigns and public appearances. That being the case, Cruz fils has no ground to stand on regarding the media not going after his father’s bizarro statements. If he doesn’t want to have to answer questions about his dad — and look, for all I know, he’s got no problem with it — he should leave his dad at home when he goes out to political events.

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