Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has staked out ground to Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) right on foreign policy, and he may be doing the same on social issues in Iowa, home of the nation’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses.
Asked to respond to Paul’s comments in which he recently said that Republicans needed “agree to disagree” on social issues, Cruz said he believed that the GOP could be a big-tent party by embracing American values that “have been present in our country, every small town, every small business, every family for centuries.”
“There are some who say that the Republican Party should no longer stand for life; I don’t agree with them,” Cruz said Tuesday in an interview with the Des Moines Register before he keynoted an event for Iowa’s influential homeschoolers. “There are some who say that the Republican Party should no longer stand for traditional marriage; I don’t agree with them either.”
After emphasizing that he was a fiscal and social conservative, Cruz said that “we should continue to defend our shared values” and emphasized that he believed “we should continue to defend life, and we should continue to defend traditional marriage.”
Cruz and Paul may both run for president in 2016, and when asked again if he disagreed with Paul’s recent comments, Cruz simply said, “I’ll let him characterize his views.” Paul would have strong support from Iowa’s liberty movement should he choose to run, and Cruz’s potential path to victory may be to win the appeal of Evangelical social conservatives while appealing to “somewhat conservative” voters on foreign policy.
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