When Sen. Ted Cruz’s official Twitter account “liked” a pornographic video late Monday night, many delighted in the fact that as a Texas state attorney, he had once argued that there is no Constitutional right “to stimulate one’s genitals.”
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Cruz clarified that he doesn’t actually think about the subject very often — and explained that when he made the genitals argument, he was just doing his job.
“I spent five-and-a-half years as the solicitor general in Texas, I worked for the attorney general. The attorney general’s job is to defend the laws passed by the Texas legislature. One of those laws was a law restricting the sale of sex toys, which is a stupid law,” Cruz said. “Consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in their bedrooms.”
The former Republican presidential candidate also denied, again, that he was the one who liked porn on Twitter. He said a staffer (whom he would not identify) was responsible, adding that the staffer “feels terrible.”
In 2007, when Cruz served as a Texas public servant, his legal team filed a 76-page brief defending a state law that sought to ban the sale of dildos and sex toys — which the brief described as “obscene devices,” according to Mother Jones.
The brief, filed with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, asserted that Texas had a “government” interest in “discouraging … autonomous sex.” Furthermore, Cruz’s office asserted, “There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.”
But as he explained Wednesday, he was only doing his job.