Remember when Ian Reisner and his partner – two gay businessmen from New York – hosted an event for Ted Cruz? Allahpundit wrote about the unusual meeting shortly after it happened and he made some rather prescient predictions.
[Cruz] says the NYT was trying to suggest that he was somehow compromised in his conservatism for socializing with pro-SSM gay constituents, but I don’t know. Maybe the Times’s angle was really that Weiderpass and Reisner were compromised in their gayness for socializing with Cruz. The media understands very well by now what happens to business owners who stray from gay-marriage orthodoxy. If you’re interested in enforcing that orthodoxy, as most of the press is, you’ll achieve more by making life hard for Weiderpass and Reisner than you will trying to make it hard for Cruz.
Well, that didn’t take long at all. The vultures descended on Reisner quickly and he’s now come out to apologize for the horrible mistake of actually talking to somebody who disagreed with him on a political issue.
Ian Reisner, one of the two gay hoteliers facing boycott calls for hosting an event for Senator Ted Cruz, who is adamantly opposed to gay marriage, apologized to the gay community for showing “poor judgment.”
Mr. Reisner put the apology on Facebook, where a page calling for a boycott of his properties, the gay-friendly OUT NYC hotel and his Fire Island Pines holdings, had gotten more than 8,200 “likes” by Sunday evening.
“I am shaken to my bones by the e-mails, texts, postings and phone calls of the past few days. I made a terrible mistake,” wrote Mr. Reisner.
The hoteliers were already losing business and facing what seemed to be a total blacklisting from their peers. And for what? For the sin of talking to someone… not even agreeing with them. Just allowing them to speak. The strange spectacle apparently included moments where the hosts and the Texas Senator actually agreed on some issues involving tax policy and Israel. Sure, they discussed gay marriage. The hosts are for it, Cruz is against it. That much was obvious before anyone served the first finger sandwiches. But even talking to “the enemy” was enough to bring out the activists with their pitchforks and torches, forcing Reisner to bend a knee in public and grovel to them.
And what effect did this have on Cruz? From what I can tell, not a thing. By this time, anyone who observes American politics even casually has become familiar with Cruz’s style. He will go anywhere at any time and talk to anyone about his values and vision for the country. He doesn’t scream or go crazy on them and seems to be polite to a fault while unswerving in his message. Cruz doesn’t have any problem going outside of his comfort zone because he doesn’t seem to have a comfort zone. He goes on Fox, CNN and MSNBC with equal enthusiasm. We saw him sit down with Mika Brzezinski, forcing her to later concede that he was a formidable contender. Frankly, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Cruz show up on Rachel Maddow’s show if she actually had the spine to take him on.
Have conservatives been abandoning Cruz in droves because he dares to take his message to people who disagree with him? Not that I’ve seen. And it would be suicidal to act that way. If he goes into the middle of Manhattan and talks to fifty gay marriage supporters and finds two people who like so many of his other policies that they wind up voting for him or tossing some cash to his campaign, that’s two less supporters for the eventual Democrat nominee and a few less dollars in their coffers. The opponent will not be defeated by a coup de grâce, but rather a thousand cuts.
Is Ted Cruz crazy? Crazy like a fox. And I don’t mean Fox News.
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