![obviously not gay memes obviously not gay memes](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EfK6YajXYAYSJ2w.jpg)
On marriage, he said: "Instead of a federal government that works to undermine our values, imagine a federal government that works to defend the sanctity of human life and to uphold the sacrament of marriage."Ĭruz didn’t mention atheists, but he emphasized religious faith before students at the university founded by the late Jerry Falwell, an evangelist. In the speech, Cruz mentioned marriage once, gays and atheists not at all. Next, we scrutinized a Washington Post transcript of Cruz’s Maspeech declaring for president. To our inquiry about the presented quotation, Cruz campaign spokesman Rick Tyler said by email it’s "obviously false." In fact, online searches and a check of the Nexis news database yielded no evidence Cruz, a Houston lawyer elected to the Senate in 2012, has ever made a comment about the Constitution leaving no place for gays or atheists in his America. Still, the meme as a whole struck us as leaving the impression that Cruz said it.Īnd it doesn’t look like he did. The image did not put the statement in quotation marks. But the image and purported Cruz statement had been sent out by the group in this March 25, 2015, tweet: The afternoon we scrolled the page, we didn’t spot the Cruz meme. It is primarily satire and parody with a mix of political memes and messages." The image had a tagline mentioning a Facebook page titled " Stop the World, The Teabaggers Want Off." Off we clicked, learning that Facebook page includes this disclaimer about its posts: "This page is for entertainment purposes. SOURCE: Facebook post, Ma(noted by a PolitiFact reader April 2, 2015) Now let’s turn to the Facebook post brought to our attention most recently: senator who announced his presidential candidacy at Liberty University in Virginia, had conveniently flip-flopped on each president needing to be born in the United States. We recently found Pants on Fire a Facebook post saying the Canada-born Cruz, the Republican U.S. Here we go again: A reader just pointed out a Facebook meme suggesting Texan Ted Cruz declared America constitutionally off limits to gays and atheists last month when he declared his candidacy for president.