Ted Cruz the latest GOP Senator calling to roll back marriage rights for LGBTQ Americans

CNN analyst Margaret Hoover on Monday hammered Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for saying the Supreme Court should now move to roll back marriage rights for LGBTQ Americans. Cruz recently said that the landmark case establishing nationwide LGBTQ marriage rights "was clearly wrong" because "marriage was always an issue that was left to the states."

Cruz recently said that the landmark case establishing nationwide LGBTQ marriage rights "was clearly wrong" because "marriage was always an issue that was left to the states" and "the court said, no, we know better than you guys do and now every state must sanction and permit gay marriage."

Reacting to this, Hoover accused the Texas senator of appealing to rank prejudice among GOP voters.

"Ted Cruz is pandering, not just to the base of the Republican Party, but to the worst kind of bigotry in the Republican Party," she said. "The Texas GOP has passed this plank saying that gay marriage is abnormal."

Fellow CNN analyst John Avlon then suggested that Cruz's statements were part of a coordinated campaign to build consensus around overturning marriage rights, as evidenced by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's declaration that the court should reexamine its past ruling in the Obergefell v. Hodges case.

Hoover shared Avlon's assessment.

"What this is about, right, is on the political side you always want to start gathering momentum politically," she said. "Because the court has traditionally been afraid of being ahead of where the public opinion is on any political issue. 70 percent of the country is in favor of same-sex marriage now. 55 percent of Republicans as of 2021 were in favor of same-sex marriage. The country has gotten more in favor of same-sex marriage, not less, but the country is also more in favor of certain restrictions and protections of abortion and the court reversed that."

The states’ rights argument has been used since the birth of our nation to deprive Americans of fundamental freedoms. Most notably, after the Civil War, Southern states including Mississippi,South Carolina and Louisiana adopted new state constitutions designed to suppress the Black vote. Leaders invoked states’ rights to enact Jim Crow-era laws to deprive Black Americans of equality.

Cruz is not the first Republican senator to push back against the Supreme Court’s past ruling in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges landmark case that established the right to same sex marriage. In May, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told reporters that he believed Obergefell was "wrongly decided" but said he believed that it was "settled law" and that he would be "shocked" if it were overturned, Business Insider reported.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion overturning Roe v. Wade that the court “should reconsider” cases recognizing same-sex marriage, the constitutional right to birth control and a prohibition on state laws that criminalized consensual sex between same-sex individuals.