Last month, Ted Cruz delivered a warning to the Republican Jewish Coalition: If the GOP nominates Donald Trump for president, the general election will be a "bloodbath."
The Texas senator assured the group that he is not the right-wing firebrand he has been made out to be. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that "Cruz said social issues devolve to the states and suggested he would not seek to impose his views as a president."
"Nobody wants to elect a hectoring scold," he said.
However, this more moderate and toned-down version of Ted Cruz didn't last very long, as just days later he launched new attacks against transgender people, smearing them as likely sexual predators. In a television ad, Cruz's campaign attacked Trump and Hillary Clinton for "letting transgender men go in little girls' bathrooms"; on the campaign trail, he suggested that his daughters may be assaulted by transgender women.
Cruz then said that he doesn't think transgender people should be let into public restrooms at all, instead saying that they should only be allowed to go to the bathroom at home.
Such attacks shouldn't be surprising, considering that Cruz has spent his entire presidential campaign courting the support of radical anti-LGBT activists.
Cruz's campaign is stacked with anti-gay leaders like Gordon Klingenschmitt, a Colorado state lawmaker who also happens to be an anti-LGBT exorcist who believes that gay people "should be discriminated against"; Gary Glenn, a Michigan lawmaker who wants to outlaw homosexuality; and North Carolina activists Flip Benham and Ron Baity, who have crashed gay couples' weddings and likened gay people to "maggots," respectively.
Two people with roles in Cruz's campaign, Republican Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, have defended Uganda's "kill-the-gays" bill. Cruz even gladly made a campaign ad with "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson, who said at one Cruz campaign event that Americans should "rid the earth" of gay marriage supporters.
He promised a group of anti-LGBT activists that if he is elected president, "we will not use the federal government to enforce [the] lawless decision [on same-sex marriage]." Speaking with conservative pundits, he warned that marriage equality will destroy the freedom of speech and denounced what he called the gay "jihad" on freedom.
Then there was Cruz's attendance at a "religious liberties" conference in Iowa last year that was hosted by radical anti-LGBT pastor Kevin Swanson, who used the forum to promote the death penalty for homosexuality, rail against the Harry Potter books for supposedly turning kids gay, and promise that if his son were ever to marry another man he would show up to the wedding covered in cow manure.
Even after having been warned about Swanson's views on national TV, Cruz attended the event and participated in an onstage interview with Swanson, where he lavished praise on Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who tried to block her office from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples by citing "God's authority," and called the Supreme Court's marriage equality ruling "fundamentally illegitimate." The candidate eventually -- after much criticism -- said that he regretted his appearance at the conference and falsely claimed to have immediately denounced Swanson upon learning about his views.
Despite Cruz's attempt to reposition himself as the more reasonable alternative to Trump, his anti-LGBT record is one more example of his blatant extremism.