BIG FALLS, IOWA — Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) took his presidential campaign to the state of Iowa this week. With that state’s caucuses fast approaching, a spokesperson for Rubio said the senator was “hopeful that a visit to the Hawkeye State would remind everyone that Ted Cruz and Donald Trump aren’t the only stridently old fashioned and reality-resistant options” for Republican voters in the 2016 primary race.
Rubio reiterated to the crowd in attendance at a rally in Big Falls, Iowa on Monday what he told NBC’s Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press” over the weekend. “I don’t believe any case law is settled law,” Rubio told Todd, adding, “any future Supreme Court can change it. And ultimately, I will appoint Supreme Court justices that will interpret the Constitution as originally constructed.” Senator Rubio also told the NBC host that “no one should ever be compelled to sin by law” and he rejects the idea that “the current Constitution gives the federal government the power to regulate marriage.”
“It’s not about discrimination. It is about the definition of a very specific, traditional, and age-old institution,” Rubio told Todd. “If you want to change it,” he said, “you have a right to petition your state legislature and your elected representatives to do it. What is wrong is that the Supreme Court has found this hidden constitutional right that 200 years of jurisprudence had not discovered and basically overturn the will of voters in Florida, where over 60 percent passed a constitutional amendment that defined marriage in the state constitution as the union of one man and one woman.”
In Iowa on Monday, Rubio explained himself further, saying that “just because we live in 2015, we don’t have to just accept the progress that’s been made up to this point, before some of us were even born or could vote.” Rubio said that he often goes to “special doctors” that “perform traditional medical techniques like bloodletting and leeching,” because he knows as a conservative “to just cast away things from the past just because they don’t work or have really harmful side effects is wholly un-American and bad for society in general.”
“A lot of candidates will give you flowery prose about bringing you into the next era. They’ll want to be the President of the Future, but not me,” Senator Rubio told his supporters. “I know as a conservative that all the so-called progress we’ve made as a society — whether it’s giving women the right to vote, or taking away a plantation owner’s right to own the best black slaves money can buy — has been either actually bad for the country, didn’t do enough good, or in some other way that I’ll think of later made this country worse than it was before,” Rubio said, “we didn’t need child labor laws, the invisible hand of the market would have phased it out, just like it may have at one point, maybe, possibly end slavery in this country even though it had been ended decades before in Europe and we showed no signs of stopping it here.”
“I want to lead us to an old day,” Rubio said as he closed the rally out, “and an old era of renewed status quo discrimination against non-white, non-Christian Americans.”
