Texas Republican Ted Cruz would not say if Troy Newman is advising his Senate reelection campaign against Democrat Colin Allred. Three times in the past week—once in the Senate parking lot and twice in the Capitol’s hallways—I tried asking Cruz if Newman had a role in his campaign. “Nice try,” Cruz laughed each time.
Newman, an anti-choice extremist, is best known as the leader of Operation Rescue, the group best known for leading the protests outside an abortion clinic in Kansas where George Tiller, one of the few doctors who would perform late-term abortions, was assassinated in 1991.
Back in 2016, when he was running for president, Cruz did not equivocate about Newman at all. “I am grateful to receive the endorsement of Troy Newman,” Cruz said then, after naming Newman a co-chair of his failed presidential election campaign. “He has served as a voice for the unborn for over 25 years and works tirelessly every day for the pro-life cause. We need leaders like Troy Newman in this country who will stand up for those who do not have a voice.”
Cruz has long been a right-wing firebrand when it comes to abortion and a litany of other social conservative issues. In 2016, he tried to attack Donald Trump for being insufficiently opposed to abortion rights. He pledged back then that he “would sign any legislation on my desk to defend the least of these,” even without exception for the life of the mother.
But much has changed since Cruz’s failed campaign. In 2021, Texas’s Heartbeat Act went into effect, which included a six-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, along with provisions empowering individuals to enforce the law through civil lawsuits against anyone who performed or assisted in an abortion. Then, in 2022, thanks to three jurists whom Cruz voted to confirm, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Now Cruz faces a tough reelection fight against Allred, a Democratic congressman and former NFL player. Polls show Allred either narrowly behind or even ahead of Cruz. And Cruz’s ties to Newman might complicate his prospects. Allred is campaigning hard on his support for abortion rights.
The altered landscape has some observers wondering where Newman fits in with Cruz today. Last month, Mother Jones reported that a Cruz campaign press release from 2016 announcing the “Pro-Lifer for Cruz” group Newman co-chaired cited some extremist quotes from the activist’s 2001 book, Their Blood Cries Out, which Newman co-authored with Cheryl Sullenger. In the book, MoJo reported, Newman and Sullenger wrote that, in dealing with the “blood-guilty,” the U.S. government’s responsibility “rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes.”
The book also includes previously unreported antisemitic tropes, thematically linking abortion supporters today to alleged Jewish sins of the past. “The bloodguilt associated with murdering Jesus, the prophets, and then the Apostles caused a great firestorm of judgment to fall upon the Jewish people,” Newman writes. “It was a judgment so severe that the Jewish people will never recover. There has been a partial retribution. All the righteous blood from Abel to Jesus has been paid for through the destruction of Israel in 70 AD. In the same way that Israel was polluted with innocent blood, so is America defiled and cursed with the innocent blood of aborted children.”
This rhetoric is not all 20 years old. Last December 15, over two decades after his book was first published, Newman posted publicly on his Facebook profile, “Is it Christians[’] job to assist those who reject Jesus Christ to build a temple so they can offer animal blood and blaspheme the Blood of Jesus?” One of Newman’s followers replied to his post: “What makes you think that is what you’re called to do? Or even that others think you should do?”
Newman continued, that same evening, “Many Christians are donating to build a third temple in Jerusalem. So they can sacrifice the perfect red heifer and usher in a new kingdom. In my opinion, that’s anathema to God.” “Red heifer” references a purification ritual in ancient Judaism.
In his book, Newman uses the sacking of Jerusalem and destruction of the Jewish temple there by the Romans to argue that so-called Jewish bloodguilt is similar to the bloodguilt Planned Parenthood has today for providing abortion services.
“As Baal worshipers filled Israel with sexual immorality and child-sacrifice, Planned Parenthood and others of their ilk film America with the worship to the idol gods of the sexual revolution and abortion,” Newman writes. “The people of Israel refused to rebuke those who sacrificed people to Baal. Christians seem shocked when they read that the apostate Israelites allowed Baal worship even in the temple of God all the while Planned Parenthood board members are allowed to sit as elders in some of our churches. This is the height of hypocrisy!” he continues.
In another passage, Newman writes: “Just as in the days of Gideon, Elijah, and Ezekiel, idolatry was the order of the day. The Jewish religion had perverted itself to the point where from all outward appearances, it looked like Judaism but it was a counterfeit religion.”
Danya Ruttenberg, a Chicago rabbi who is an award-winning author once listed by the Daily Forward as among the country’s most influential women rabbis, said Newman’s argument “is textbook antisemitism. It’s also wildly ignorant of history (the Romans killed Jesus, and the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, both for pretty much the same reasons—Empires crush dissent) and the content of the actual Bible to which he professes to adhere. The Book of Exodus (21:22-25) itself distinguishes between the consequences for causing a miscarriage (one must pay monetary damage) and the death of a pregnant person (it’s treated as manslaughter).”
Moreover, Ruttenberg said by email, the “child sacrifice” that Newman cites “was condemned by the Hebrew Prophets, and was that of actual born babies. Exodus is clear that causing the termination of a pregnancy—of potential life—is not murder.”
Newman did not reply to two email requests for comment.
Cruz likely could get away with tying himself to such figures when Texas was a firmly red state. But as he faces a tight Senate race where he must actually do his job instead of record another episode of his podcast, Newman might prove to be a drag on him. After all, there must be a reason he refused to answer a question about Newman three different times.
