Ted Cruz on Thursday criticized the backlash to North Carolina’s transgender bathroom law after Republican presidential rival Donald Trump indicated he opposed the controversial measure.
“We have gone off the deep end. This is absurd,” Cruz said during an interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck, a backer of the GOP White House hopeful’s campaign.
{mosads}Beck asked Cruz how he’d argue that his position isn’t aimed at targeting transgender people but rather at “the heterosexual pervert” who would try to flout gender-specific bathroom laws.
Cruz pointed to his two daughters, ages 5 and 8, arguing that the younger one “knows the difference between boys and girls.”
“You’ve got the Obama Education Department suing to try to force junior highs to let teenage boys to shower with teenage girls,” he later said.
“That’s crazy. It’s not a reasonable position,” Cruz continued. “The idea that grown men would be allowed alone in a bathroom with little girls — you don’t need to be a behavior psychologist to realize that bad things can happen, and any prudent person wouldn’t allow that.”
“When you deal with people who are repulsive perverts and criminals — there are some bad people in the world and we shouldn’t be facilitating putting little girls alone in a bathroom with grown, adult men. That is just a bad, bad, bad idea,” the Texas senator said, mentioning his experience as solicitor general in Texas handling cases of “child molesters, of pedophiles.”
Trump earlier Thursday morning said North Carolina unnecessarily mandated transgender people use public restrooms that correspond to their biological gender in legislation aimed at preventing cities and counties from passing their own nondiscrimination ordinances.
“North Carolina, what they’re going through with all the business that is leaving and strife — and it’s on both sides — you leave it the way it is,” Trump said during an interview on NBC’s “Today” show. He also indicated he’d let Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender woman, use any bathroom she wanted in Trump Tower.
Cruz later tweeted a response to Trump’s comments, saying it’s “common sense” to oppose transgender bathrooms.