A recent New York Times tells some surprising stories about Texas Republican Senator and presidential hopeful, Ted Cruz. The Times article featured statements by Senator Cruz’s former partners on the Princeton college debate team.
Cruz has come under scrutiny for statements he has made about reproductive rights as a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Science. In his college debate career, his attempts at humor showed that not understanding reproductive biology may not be anything new to the junior Senator.
According to debater David Kennedy’s recollection in a 2001 Harvard debate team reunion booklet, Cruz once proposed that God should “give women a hymen that grows back every time she has intercourse with a different guy, because that will be a ‘visible sign’ of the breach of trust.”
Mr. Kennedy’s debate partner, a woman, responded to Mr. Cruz’s poor knowledge of female anatomy by twisting around to demonstrate the problem with Cruz’s “visible” solutions.
Debater’s also recalled that Cruz often used his Cuban heritage as a rhetorical technique with similar results. In one debate on whether I Love Lucy‘s Ricky Ricardo should have let his wife work at his club, Cruz had this to say:
“Well, guess what, I’m Cuban! And no self-respecting Cuban man of the era would let his wife work.”
Cruz may make similarly memorable attempts at “humor” in the upcoming Republican primary debates.