This isn’t a sentence I ever expected to write, but here goes nonetheless: Ted Cruz was entirely justified in taking the position he did on the constitutionality of Texas’s anti-dildo law, and those who are hitting him for having done so are outing themselves as opportunists…

Ugh. Cruz is a weirdo, right? A Puritan? A creep? A loser obsessed with other people’s sex lives?

Not at all. Rather, Cruz was a) doing his job within the solicitor general’s office — namely, fighting for the state’s laws regardless of his personal opinion of them; b) forwarding an entirely unexceptional view of the 14th Amendment’s original public meaning; and c) appealing to a legal precedent that remained in tact until the rambling mess that is Obergefell v. Hodges blew it wide open eight years later.