 So look, Obergefell, like Roe versus Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation's history. Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. We saw states before Obergefell that were moving. Some states were moving to allow gay marriage. Other states were moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that the states were adopting. And had the court not ruled in Obergefell, the democratic process would have continued to operate that if you believed gay marriage was a good idea, the way the Constitution set up for you to advance that position is to convince your fellow citizens. And if you succeeded in convincing your fellow citizens, then your state would change the laws to reflect those views. In Obergefell, the court said, no, we know better than you guys do. And now every state must sanction and permit gay marriage. I think that decision was clearly wrong when it was decided. It was the court overreaching. Whether the court will reverse it, I will say so in Dobbs, what the Supreme Court said is Roe is different because it's the only one of the cases that involves the taking of a human life. And that's qualitatively different. I agree with that proposition. That was Senator Ted Cancun Cruz on his YouTube show, suggesting that the Supreme Court should indeed overturn Obergefell the Hodges, which for those of you who don't know is the landmark 2015 Supreme Court case that said states are not allowed to ban same sex marriages. Now, he's right to point out that in his majority opinion, Alito claimed that the precedent from the Dobbs case where they overturned Roe v. Wade was constrained to the issue of abortion. The problem is that that was nothing more than a transparent attempt to placate people who were rightfully concerned that the Supreme Court would take a hatchet to other civil rights that we fought for and want. Now, in his concurring opinion, Thomas was actually pretty honest. And he said, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell, which by the way is contraception, gay intimacy and marriage equality, respectively. And he adds, because any substantive due process decision is demonstrably erroneous, we have a duty to correct the error established in those precedents. In other words, contraception, gay intimacy and gay marriages. These were not rights that were explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. They were essentially found within the due process clause. And since we were able to strike down abortion as a constitutional right, since that too was not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, then it logically follows that we should also be able to do the same to contraception, gay intimacy and marriage equality. So Ted Cruz is wrong here. And I think that what he's trying to do is stagger the outrage. Now, what I mean by that is, you know, if everyone finds out that not only are they losing the right to an abortion, but contraception, marriage equality all at once, that might be too much outrage and might destabilize the country. But if you kind of let people know that they no longer have the right to an abortion and then you wait a year or two and then you take away another civil right, then perhaps the anger from the last issue will have died down. And you know, you kind of just give them a drip feed of losing civil rights and civil liberties, and that's kind of the way to maintain social order, I think. But Ted Cruz is saying here, I don't think that the Supreme Court is going to do this, but in actuality, he knows that this is indeed what they're going to do. They will overturn marriage equality, and that's what he wants them to do. Now, he wrongly stated that marriage was always an issue left to the states until Obergefell v. Hodges. But he's leaving out a really important case that disproves what he's saying. Loving the Virginia. That was the landmark Supreme Court ruling that established the right to interracial marriages. Yeah, that's also not a right explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. But, you know, ironically, Clarence Thomas didn't want to revisit that one because he himself is in an interracial marriage. But Ted Cruz is wrong to say, oh, well, marriage was always something that was left up to the states. Actually, no. The Supreme Court stated you were not allowed to ban marriages and deny couples marriage licenses on the basis of race. And because of Loving Virginia, the Supreme Court applied that same rationale to Obergefell to find that states also cannot deny marriage licenses on the basis of sex or sexual orientation or gender identity. Now, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, there are currently five hundred forty three thousand married same sex couples and another four hundred sixty nine thousand same sex couples who may one day choose to get married. Now, if those hundreds of thousands of marriages are abolished, they lose access to a plethora of federal benefits, including tax incentives, social security, immigration benefits, federal employment benefits like health care. I mean, the list goes on. So the federal government has and always will be inextricably linked to marriages because without the federal government, we couldn't get these federal benefits as a result of our marriages. There are state and federal benefits. So Ted Cruz, he knows this. This is somebody who went to law school, but he's being purposefully deceitful here because he wants to make it seem as if like abortion, marriage equality is another another state's rights issue. You know, you can have certain states have marriage equality. That's fine, according to Ted Cruz. But you know, if the state wants to ban it, that's fine. Now, what's interesting is that in his state, you know that they would be a state that would indeed ban marriage equality. They want to ban day intimacy. Lawrence v. Texas, that stemmed from a law in Texas that banned gay couples from being intimate. But what's really disgusting and shows how craving Ted Cruz is, is that he wants to take away a crucial civil right from his own daughter. Because, yes, Ted Cruz's daughter recently came out as bisexual and stated that she disagrees with her far right father. So imagine being so craving that for political purposes, you vocalize your desire to see a case that won a crucial civil right for your daughter overturned. That is despicable. You'd fuck over your own flesh and blood just so that way you can score cheap political points. That's Ted Cruz. That's who Ted Cruz is, a despicable individual. Now, I don't think I've ever said anything nice about the British monarchy on this program. But Prince Harry, he spoke before the U.N. and he and this was on Nelson Mandela Day and he said something really, really important about what we're seeing globally, a trend towards authoritarianism. And he name dropped the United States specifically for taking away civil rights. Let's watch. How many of us feel battered, helpless in the face of the seemingly endless stream of disasters and devastation? I understand. This has been a painful year in a painful decade. We're living through a pandemic that continues to ravage communities in every corner of the globe. Climate change wreaking havoc on our planet with the most vulnerable suffering, most of all. The few weaponizing lies and disinformation at the expense of the many. And from the horrific war in Ukraine to the rolling back of constitutional rights here in the United States, we are witnessing a global assault on democracy and freedom. And that right there is exactly how this should be characterized. The GOP is waging an all out assault, not just on democracy, but freedom. It's not just about gay intimacy. It's not just about same sex marriages. It is about freedom. You see some states trying to ban gender, affirming care, form trans youth. And we're talking about just letting children socially transition if their parents allow that. So they want to restrict the way that people express themselves. That's a First Amendment. Right. Gender expression falls under the First Amendment. We're seeing very popular far right pundits like Jordan Peterson and Matt Walsh say that they don't believe trans people, even trans adults, should be allowed to transition. They shouldn't be allowed the freedom to transition. Live and let live. No, we want to control what people do with their bodies, how they express themselves. You have rising stars in the GOP. Fascists like Ron DeSantis banning books, citing critical race theory. So we are seeing an all out assault on freedom. And this is happening in the broader context of an assault on democracy. It's not just civil rights and civil liberties being rolled back by the GOP. But we're seeing the decline of democracy because of lies spread about the election with Donald Trump and the Trump wing of the Republican Party and even the Supreme Court with Morvey Harper. That's the case that I've talked about that could be the end of democracy in the United States. And it's not like we have a functioning democracy to begin with. But what's left of it goes the way of the dodo. If the Supreme Court affirms the legitimacy of independent state legislature theory, I've done a video on that. I'm not going to talk about that here, but we are witnessing an all out assault on civil rights and freedom. And the GOP are the ones that are waging this war on our freedoms. So any person till this day that supports the GOP as they wage a war on freedom, take that as an attack on your civil rights, on your civil liberties and confront them about this, correct them about this, get them to understand that this doesn't just mean that gay people and people who want to have abortions are losing their rights. They're going to lose their rights, too. It's not just minorities and marginalized people who lose their rights. Everyone loses their rights as democracy declines. So this is really despicable and people like Ted Cruz, who know better, are choosing to go along with the death of our democracy with the decline of civil rights, even if he has a daughter, who this is going to impact in a negative way. It's truly despicable, but this is the modern GOP where they put their own careers and political ambitions above civil rights, basic human rights. It's despicable, but this is what we've come to expect. Ted Cruz isn't the first person to do this in the GOP, and he's certainly not going to be the last person to do this in the GOP, even if he's fucking over his own family.