On a Tuesday conference call with the Cruz campaign’s National Prayer Team, Heidi Cruz compared the change Ted Cruz would surely make in the United States to the abolition of slavery. But what has Cruz liberated us from, other than my own sexual desire???
“I don’t want you to feel like any of this was in vain. I believe in the power of prayer. This doesn’t always happen on the timing of man, and God does not work in four-year segments,” Heidi Cruz said, referring to the four-year presidential term.
“Be full of faith and so full of joy that this team was chosen to fight a long battle,” she continued, according to the Texas Tribune. “Think that slavery—it took 25 years to defeat slavery. That is a lot longer than four years.”
Pause. Where’s that “25 years” figure coming from?
It definitely isn’t coming from an enslaved individual’s perspective. According to Slate, one of the first known instances of slavery occurred when the ship Desire brought a group of people from Barbados to Boston in 1634 to be sold into American slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation, the document that ended slavery for states that had seceded from the Union (not in any of the border states and many Confederate states) was issued on January 1, 1863. The 13th Amendment which formally abolished slavery wasn’t ratified until 1865, and even then, slavery was far from being a memory. That’s at least 231 years of slavery, which accounts for 231 years of at least some people undoubtedly speaking out against it!
Stassa Edwards, Jezebel’s resident historian, says that a liberal interpretation of the 25 years figure could refer to London’s World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. Fine, but even that convention represented an attempt to organize and strengthen an already fomenting movement to end the practice. And also, just for good measure, let’s remember that there are still slaves.
So girl, what?
On the call, Cruz assured the team that male Cruz would not be wasting these four upcoming years by not doing the equivalent of ending slavery.
“We are not only keeping this band together, we have been having meetings five hours a day since the time we dropped out,” she said, failing to mention that most of the meetings were probably devoted to planning which sorts of people of various ethnicities and sexual orientations the Cruzes would disenfranchise if they had the chance.
“Every single person in our leadership team in our campaign, Ted and I will probably be working with on a weekly basis in the next four years.”
Image via Getty.
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