Thursday, April 14, 2016

Sloppy Journalism, Distortions, and Sex Toys

An article posted on the secular humanist site Patheos suggested that Cruz is opposed to masturbation and sex toys, because of a law he defended while Solicitor General for the state of Texas.  The problem is that while his office defended the law as was their obligation, the quote about masturbation that was used in that case was actually a reference from other cases and Cruz wasn't the one that actually argued the case.  The fact that his office defended the law doesn't  mean that it reflects his personal beliefs.  Snopes rated the claims made in the article as mostly false.

I tried to point this out in the comments section of the article and was told that Snopes wasn't referring to the article even though Snopes specifically refers to and quotes from the Patheos article.  As Snopes mentions a Mother Jones article which had misleading statements in it as well.  Other left leaning sites have picked up the ball and ran with it.  If you do a Google search for why did Ted Cruz defend the Texas law regarding sex toys, you can read through what each one says and you'll find that overall most are misleading or haven't pointed out the things that Snopes did.

So why are secular humanists bringing this up?  Let me start off by saying that I'm not religious myself, but I'm not a secular humanist.  Secular humanists tend to have very liberal beliefs and some are very anti religious.  I'm neither.  My assertion is that they are contriving this because they disagree with Ted's politics.  Why they don't just criticize his politics is beyond me.  They tend to think that Republicans and Tea Party supporters are all Christian fundamentalists.  I know plenty of Tea Party supporters who are not religious.   If you look at the bottom of the Patheos article, you will notice that their sources are Mother Jones, Occupy Democrats, and AddictingInfo so it wasn't based on anything objective.  AddictingInfo is very slanted and has a reputation for posting stuff that turns out to either not be true or is not even close to the way they describe it.

They argue that Ted is a Dominionist theocrat because of his association with David Barton and Glen Beck.  Just because those guys support him, doesn't mean he is a Dominionist.  Ted respects the beliefs of Muslims, atheists, etc.  He just doesn't believe that religion should be excluded from the public square.  Even though I'm not religious, I don't have a problem with the Ten Commandments in a court house, a nativity scene on city property, or a prayer at a high school graduation.  Many atheists and humanists do though and much of that stems from an opposition to religion itself.  They can be as dogmatically rigid as some religious people are.  I know, I once was a staunch anti religious atheist and humanist, but I came to view it as both ignorant and dogmatic.  Many countries in Europe have had state sponsored churches for centuries and yet are much more secular.  Mixing religion and government doesn't necessarily mean we would become a Christian version of Iran.  The whole Dominionist thing with regards to Ted sounds more like a wild eyed conspiracy theory.

This video gives a better view of Ted's views on religious liberty: Megyn Kelly asks Ted Cruz about atheists