Cruz uses transgender restroom access as ammo in GOP fight
INDIANAPOLIS — As Sen. Ted Cruz seeks every possible edge to stop Donald Trump, he has seized on a once-obscure issue with a proven power to inflame conservatives: letting transgender women use women’s bathrooms.
Cruz mentions it constantly in Indiana, a state with many social conservatives that is all but a last stand for him in his fight to deprive Trump of the Republican presidential nomination.
With polls showing a narrower lead for Trump in Indiana than in the five Eastern states he swept Tuesday, the Cruz campaign’s private polling indicates that the bathroom issue has the power to help close the gap.
Moreover, it is fresh in Indiana voters’ minds because of high-profile battles in the state in recent years over gay rights.
“Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both agree that grown men should be allowed to use the little girls’ restroom,” Cruz said Tuesday night as a crowd in Knightstown booed heartily. He made the remarks after coming before the crowd with his two daughters, 7 and 5, who wore matching pink dresses.
Cruz has alternated between mockery and outrage nearly every day in highlighting Trump’s stance, seizing on it after Trump said last week that people should be free to “use the bathroom they feel is appropriate.” Trump was responding to the furor over a North Carolina law that stripped legal protections from gay and transgender people.
Topic at convention?
In leveraging the issue, Cruz has raised the specter of sexual predators in women’s restrooms, which conservatives around the country have effectively invoked to defeat anti-dis- crimination laws — and which gay rights advocates denounce as a myth.
The topic could surface in July at the Republican convention, where a fight is brewing in the platform committee to overturn the party’s historical objection to same-sex marriage.
In a little-noticed move this winter, the Republican National Committee called on states to pass laws limiting access to school bathrooms and locker rooms based on students’ “anatomical sex.”
Social conservatives in Indiana have been on high alert since last year, when Gov. Mike Pence and fellow Republican lawmakers amended a so-called religious freedom law, bending to an outcry that the legislation would let businesses refuse service to gays and lesbians.
One social conservative leader who objected to what he called watering down the law, Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Asso- ciation of Indiana, campaigned this week with Cruz.
He said Cruz’s attack on Trump was meant to show that Trump is a liberal who supports the right of transgender people to “choose the bathroom that aligns with their identity that day.”
Houston vote key
Though Clark said bathroom access was not at the top of voters’ concerns, he predicted that Indiana Republicans would reject Trump on the matter.
In Houston, Cruz’s hometown, voters repealed a broad anti-discrimination ordinance last year after opponents said it would allow sexual predators to enter women’s restrooms.
But it was North Carolina that thrust the issue into the nation’s consciousness last month, after state lawmakers passed a law prohibiting transgender people from using a public restroom that does not cor- respond to the gender on their birth certificate.
Trump waded into the debate in a television interview last week, saying there had “been very few problems” with transgender people using public bathrooms, and advising North Carolina to “leave it the way it is.”
He said he would be fine with Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic gold medalist in the men’s decathlon and a reality television star, using any bathroom she wanted to at Trump Tower.
Later, Trump amended his stance, saying it was up to cities and states to decide on their own.
Cruz attacked Trump for political correctness and yoked him to Clinton as a liberal.