Today, HRC released the following statement after Senator Ted Cruz suspended his campaign for President -- days after launching a series of false attacks against transgender people.
“Ted Cruz has waged an ugly, bigoted campaign against LGBT equality for months. Cruz will be remembered for spending the last days of his presidential campaign shamefully trying to stoke a dangerous brand of hate against transgender people like me to score political points,” said HRC Communications Director Jay Brown. “Ted Cruz’s false attack ads and repeated smears against us in the closing days of his campaign were clearly rejected by voters. There’s a lesson here -- Americans of all parties believe LGBT people should be protected from discrimination and politicians who don’t take note risk being rejected at the ballot box.”
Fact checkers have found that, contrary to the anti-transgender garbage that Cruz has been peddling, “there’s no evidence of dangerous predators pretending to be transgender in American bathrooms…” Politifact rated Ted Cruz’s ad attacking Donald Trump for supporting the right of transgender people to use restrooms consistent with their gender identity as “mostly false,” saying “the overall message is highly distorted to scare voters.”
Cruz has made anti-transgender rhetoric a staple on the campaign trail. He recently suggested transgender people should “only use restrooms at home and avoid public facilities.” In addition to his recent ad smearing transgender people, his campaign threw a transgender teenager out of a campaign event. At prior campaign events, he launched a bigoted rant against the Obama Administration's decision to support a transgender student, falsely accusing officials of forcing the school to "let a little boy take showers with junior high girls."
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Cruz has decried efforts to lift the ban prohibiting transgender Americans from serving openly in the military, even though the American Medical Association approved a resolution last year that said there is "no medically valid reason to exclude transgender individuals from service in the U.S. military."
For more on Cruz’s anti-LGBT record, click here.
| Paid for by Human Rights Campaign PAC. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. |