Read the Constitution? This candidate recited it
Father talks of Sen. Ted's program as youth to memorize founding document
Published: 7 hours ago
If you watched Sen. Ted Cruz give his victory speech after winning the Iowa Republican caucus on Feb. 1, you may have noticed the proud man standing behind the candidate’s left shoulder.
That was Ted’s energetic father, Rafael Cruz, staying up late to celebrate his son’s triumph.
“I went to bed about 12:30 (a.m.),” Rafael said the next day on the American Family Radio Network. “We were just rejoicing in the Lord for this great victory. To God be all the glory!”
Rafael, an ordained minister, public speaker and author of the new book, “A Time for Action: Empowering the Faithful to Reclaim America,” said he planned to go home to Dallas for only a day or so before traveling to New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, the next three primary states.
Standing behind his son is not new for the elder Cruz, however. He’s been in that post before.
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Appearing on “Today’s Issues” with Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, Rafael shared the story of how his son grew into a senator with a chance of becoming the next president of the United States.
Soon after Rafael surrendered his own life to Christ, he said, he began reading a children’s Bible to young Ted every night before putting him to bed. When Ted was eight, as the candidate has affirmed publicly, he received Jesus as his Lord and Savior while at a church youth camp.
A year after that, Rafael was heavily involved in the Religious Roundtable, an organization that worked with the Moral Majority to mobilize millions of American Christians to help elect Ronald Reagan as president. Rafael’s battle apparently rubbed off on young Ted.
“All through 1980, [when] Ted was nine years old, our conversation around the dinner table was centered on politics, on why we had to get rid of this leftist progressive Jimmy Carter and replace him with a constitutional conservative like Ronald Reagan,” Rafael recalled. “So my son, at nine years old, got a dose of conservative politics from a Christian worldview every day for a year.”
Rafael believes the real catalyst in Ted’s life happened at age 13, when Rafael and his wife introduced their son to the Free Enterprise Institute. The institute in turn introduced Ted to many of the classic writings America’s Founding Fathers had read, from great thinkers such as Adam Smith and John Locke to modern writers such as Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek and Frederic Bastiat.
Then the institute formed a group of five high-school students, including Ted, and called them the Constitutional Corroborators. They hired a memory expert and taught the five kids to memorize the entire U.S. Constitution. For the next four years, Ted and the other four Constitutional Corroborators traveled around Texas giving roughly 80 speeches on free-market economics and the Constitution.
“Before Ted left high school, he was passionate about the Constitution, about the Declaration, about free markets, about limited government, about the rule of law, and that passion became like fire in his bones,” Rafael said.
These are the foundations for Ted Cruz’s life as a principled and outspoken conservative, he said.
“And the reason I know my son, Ted, will not compromise his principles in Washington is that fire is as alive today as it was over 30 years ago,” Rafael declared.
The elder Cruz preaches that Americans of principle must get involved in the political process. Never mind that politics is a dirty business, he says – it will be even dirtier if people with solid moral principles stay out.
“If people of principle don’t run for office, if people of principle don’t even vote, then what is left?” Cruz asked rhetorically. “People without principle electing people without principle. That’s basically what Proverbs 29:2 tells us.”
The idea that Christians should stay out of the civic arena is ahistorical, according to Cruz. He said it was the great preachers of the First Great Awakening – men like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards – who lit the spark that became the American Revolution.
“When we look at the Declaration of Independence, for example … all of those grievances in the Declaration of Independence were preached from the pulpits for 10 years before they were written on the Declaration of Independence,” Cruz stated.
“The church has always been involved; it’s just in the last 50 years that they have divorced themselves from the civic arena, and that’s why we have the deterioration of morals in our society and we have so much secular humanism everywhere. It is our fault.”
However, Cruz believes Christians are beginning to wake up.
He asserted “the devil always overplays his hand,” and he thinks that is what happened when the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right last June. He sees that decision as a direct attack on religious liberty, and he noted plenty of bakers, photographers, florists, chapel owners and others have faced lawsuits and state-imposed penalties for declining to serve same-sex weddings.
Christians are the ones under assault, and Cruz believes Christians are the ones who must fight back against the dominant liberal culture. That is why the subtitle of his new book is “Empowering the Faithful to Reclaim America.”
“It is the people of God that need to take the forefront to restore our society to those Judeo-Christian principles that are what has made America the most exceptional country in the world,” Cruz declared.
Read more at
http://www.wnd.com/2016/02/read-the-constitution-this-candidate-recited-it/#6JsAmp2gJO5JgjpE.99
