Ted Cruz and Michael Knowles discuss the impact of the government shutting down the Easter services in public for Christians and the implications for religious liberty in a country founded on religious liberty . Ted and Michael talk about how the government is trying to stifle freedom of worship.
00:07:57.080We've been going to church virtually online.
00:08:00.680Our pastor made the very, I think, very sensible decision to say, we're not going to bring people
00:08:05.040together and have thousands of people in a sanctuary while there's a global pandemic going on.
00:08:09.760And, you know, I will say as it's Easter, Easter, you know, Easter Sunday from, for as long as I can remember, we would always go to church on Easter Sunday.
00:08:22.760That's the, and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.
00:08:25.900But it's worth also remembering, you know, for those of us who are Christians, the church is not a building.
00:08:40.600It's nice to be able to sing and have the music in person.
00:08:44.400It's nice to be able to worship together, but it actually has been beautiful.
00:08:48.760So what we do every Sunday morning is, is we, we come down, come down to the living room and we put, uh, we put the live stream of our church up, up on, uh, up on the TV.
00:09:17.700Number one, I was talking to my pastor earlier this week.
00:09:19.760He said that, that, that the viewership has gone through the roof, that, that a ton of people are logging on and watching it online who wouldn't necessarily come in person.
00:09:30.480And, and it is interesting because we're ending up having much longer conversations with our girls about, about the sermon, about what's going on.
00:09:41.880You know, if you're in church, you don't want to talk, talk in church and bother people.
00:09:44.920If you're in your living room, you can talk to each other and you can say, Hey, what do you think about what he just said?
00:09:50.140And, and, and, you know, you can have conversations that flow out of it that, that, that, that are, you know, what the Bible said is the, is the church is the body of believers is, is everyone who is a Christian that we're the church, not the building.
00:10:07.280And, and, and, and so even though East Easter Sunday, most of us are not going to be in a physical church.
00:10:15.160If, if, if we are giving thanks for Jesus's resurrection, then we're celebrating Easter and the church is celebrating.
00:10:23.760And, and, and I hope also, listen, this is a time, you know, I remember back when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas and, and it was devastating in Texas.
00:10:32.580It was second costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
00:10:37.280And it was really amazing to see the churches all throughout Texas, especially on the Gulf coast, coming out and helping people, helping people whose homes had been destroyed, who everything they had was lost.
00:10:47.140And, and it was a time when the church was doing what the church should, the church should be helping people, people in need, people who are scared, people, you know, our church, we've had one, one member of a woman in her eighties who died of COVID-19.
00:11:01.620And, and, and, and, you know, the ministry for seniors, it's, it's hard for seniors to be isolated.
00:11:08.600And, and, and this is a time I hope, and I believe the church is doing more to help people who are scared, who are in need.
00:11:16.580Even if we don't gather in person, it's much more important for the church to reflect the love of Jesus than to stand in, in one particular building.
00:11:25.160Right. And I think there's something else going on here too, with regard to the pandemic, which is people always think about Easter, but you forget that you don't get Easter without Good Friday.
00:11:34.260This is a reminder, this whole season of Lent, which by the way, has corresponded exactly with the coronavirus pandemic.
00:11:41.220Lent begins and you get ashes on your head if you're a Catholic or, or certain other denominations.
00:11:45.720And they say, remember, man, you are dust, to dust you shall return.
00:11:49.380And it's very easy in modern life to forget that someday, eventually, we're all going to die.
00:11:54.800We might not die from the coronavirus, let's hope, but we will die eventually.
00:11:59.480And that reminder that, you know, I think it was Dr. Johnson said, hanging concentrates the mind.
00:12:04.600You know, when you look death straight in the face, it focuses you on the bigger questions.
00:12:08.520In a way, locking down the churches might have a pretty positive effect on religion in the country.
00:12:13.880It also brings families together, whether you, whether you like it or not.
00:12:19.300Look, Caroline said, you know, I can't stand it.
00:12:58.260We stay, we stay at a distance, but it's like central Houston became Mayberry.
00:13:02.240I mean, it's an amazing thing, but something else we've started doing that, that I wanted to do for a long time is, is every night we're, we're reading from the Bible.
00:13:11.980And, and listen, I've wanted to do that regularly.
00:13:31.120It's hard as a dad, if you're in town two, three days a week, it's hard to sort of have a family discipline of after dinner, we sit down and read the Bible.
00:13:40.900And, and, and I've, I've been like guilty and thinking about it.
00:14:07.600It was, it was a bit of a mess, but it's interesting.
00:14:12.280We've gotten through, I think we're at like Matthew chapter 24.
00:14:15.880So, so we haven't been doing it that long, but it's been, been each night and, and it has been really, and, and what's interesting is it just so happens we're right now moving into Good Friday and Easter.
00:14:29.000Like, like just, just the timing worked out.
00:14:31.540We didn't sit down and plan it like this, but, but, you know, last Sunday was, was Palm Sunday.
00:14:38.120And, and we were, we were reading in Matthew where it talks about Palm Sunday and Jesus riding into Jerusalem.
00:15:04.720Our pastor said that this last Sunday, and I thought that was fascinating because a lot of what we've been talking about with the girls was, was the parallel with, with Passover.
00:15:14.600And, and, and, and, and the entire story of Passover, which we kind of take digressions as we're reading the Bible to say, okay, the people of Israel were in captivity in Egypt and, and the 10 plagues.
00:15:25.480And so Catherine sang a song on the 10 plagues, like that, that, that struck Egypt.
00:15:29.580But, but, you know, we were talking about, you know, that for the angel of death to pass over your home, that you had to put the lamb's blood on the side of the door on the top.
00:15:38.980And, and, and, and that, that, that, that is what Easter is all about, is that Jesus was the lamb sacrificed for us.
00:15:48.840And the Passover lamb, Jesus was that same sacrifice.
00:15:54.180And that story, having the opportunity to talk about it at this time where, where Easter's at home.
00:16:05.160It has made it, I think in many ways, more meaningful than being in a big service with a bunch of others.
00:16:12.220Of course, you know, this is something that my wife and I have been doing too in our little one bedroom apartment.
00:16:16.900And I think probably my greatest risk of death right now is not any pandemic.
00:16:21.140It's going to be murder when my wife finally snaps.
00:16:23.820But if that doesn't happen, you know, in the meantime, what we've been doing, especially because we're Catholic.
00:16:29.100So we have certain icons and religious images around.
00:16:32.200And when we go to church, now the church is at the kitchen table and we live stream it in from our priest who's down in Southern California.
00:16:50.340It's really just us contemplating some of these images, listening to these words, listening to these prayers.
00:16:55.880And, you know, it does remind you when Jesus says, when you pray, go into your innermost closet, you know, do it in solitude and really make it about that connection to God.
00:17:06.140And it just gives you another sense when you go and pray the rosary at night and it's just the two of you and everybody's quiet.
00:17:14.020In a way, it really amplifies your prayer and your spiritual connection to God, even when you can't go into your own church.
00:17:23.880Well, and I'll say this, this also cuts across faith.
00:17:27.300So some good friends of ours who are neighbors who are Jewish, and they celebrated this week their Passover Seder, which ordinarily they would do with the whole extended family.
00:17:38.280And they were telling me, okay, so we're just doing it with, you know, mom and dad, and they have a daughter who's really close friends with Caroline, and they have a son who's a little bit younger.
00:17:46.700And they said what they're doing is just their FaceTiming on, I think, iPads with their extended family.
00:17:52.620So with parents and sisters, you know, they're not, you know, most of us are not seeing our parents.
00:17:59.920I haven't seen either one of them in over a month because I'm not going to jeopardize their health.
00:18:05.140But it is interesting, even a Passover Seder, you know, I've been to a lot, lot of Seders, and they're wonderful and fun.
00:18:11.560But you think of them as, you know, big groups of multi-generational extended family.
00:18:16.940And with technology, you can even do that if it's just a few of you and you're trying to socially distance.
00:18:22.720You can still have a wonderful faith and family experience together.
00:18:30.820And I suspect we'll look back at these.
00:18:36.260It wouldn't surprise me if when our girls are grown, they look back to this time of spending day after day and week after week together as a family as some of their favorite time ever.
00:18:51.820But it is, you know, Caroline is in our front yard right now building a little bit of a treehouse and a tree and, you know, coming and pulling me out of I'm on conference calls with work and doing all just I'm in the middle of basically a tele-tour across Texas, like meeting, talking with all different communities.
00:19:13.800But, like, Caroline comes yesterday and says, you know, Dad, we need your help to cut the lumber.
00:19:19.100I'm not very handy, but thankfully I have told her, okay, no power tools.
00:19:24.480As an 11-year-old, I don't want severed digits.
00:19:26.700So I got the jigsaw and managed to cut the board without, in fact, severing any of my digits.
00:19:33.720But it's kind of right in the middle of the day.
00:19:35.320It's like, come to the garage and let's cut lumber to build the treehouse.
00:19:39.200There's something really nice about that.
00:19:40.880And I've noticed the same thing, as you mentioned, with your friends in the Passover Seder.
00:19:45.140People, family members, old friends that I have not called in a long time.
00:19:49.020Now we're just doing calls because that's what people are doing.
00:19:51.640I mean, it's – and speaking of connecting with people virtually, I know we've only got a few minutes left, but I do want to get to some of the mailbag because we've got some very important questions here.
00:20:00.720This is the most important one that I've read in weeks, Senator.
00:20:32.500I've got a pet theory that the prospect of Joe Exotic being pardoned is why Obama delayed endorsing Joe Biden because, you know, look, apparently Joe Exotic ran for president in 2016 against me.
00:20:48.700I didn't know it at the time against Trump.
00:21:15.200Next question from Peter, is there any evidence that China purposely delayed and lied in their report in order to tank the world economy considering that theirs was already in shambles?
00:21:29.780There is absolutely evidence that China purposely delayed and that they covered up, that when the Wuhan outbreak was ongoing, that they hid evidence of it, that they punished the scientists who were trying to blow the whistle, including the doctor who courageously did it anyway and has since died of COVID-19.
00:21:51.140You know, I'm not aware of any evidence that they did it with the intent of tanking the global economy.
00:21:58.280I think that's probably a stretch, although when it comes to ascribing malign intentions to the Chinese communists, you almost can't stretch too much.
00:22:09.260But, you know, I had an old boss who was a federal judge who used to say, never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence.
00:22:19.960And listen, I think the Chinese covered it up because they were embarrassed, because they didn't want people to know.
00:22:26.600I think there's a very real possibility that this outbreak occurred from some sort of accidental transmission.
00:22:34.260There were two facilities within miles of the Wuhan wet market where we think this started that were studying coronaviruses in bats.
00:22:44.380And I haven't seen any evidence that this was, look, there's some Internet theories that this was manufactured and is like bioterrorism.
00:22:53.900You know, look, I'm skeptical that the Chinese government would release a virus on their own people.
00:22:59.660We've seen tyrannical governments torture and murder their people.
00:23:03.260But doing it deliberately, I've seen no evidence of that.
00:23:08.320What strikes me as entirely plausible is that it was a screw up from one of the labs that may have been studying this virus.
00:23:18.080As I said, we know they were studying coronaviruses from bats.
00:23:21.060And then the whole cover up was to to hide their embarrassment, to hide their and the reason that matters is if they hadn't covered it up, we could have gone in.
00:23:31.360We could have contained this outbreak maybe and found the people who were infected and isolated them and done the contact tracing and potentially stopped this outbreak from becoming an epidemic.
00:23:42.800And then a pandemic, that if you stop it at the origin, it is entirely possible that the deaths worldwide and the trillions of dollars of economic destruction could have been covered up if the Chinese had, it could have been stopped if the Chinese hadn't engaged in this cover up.
00:25:24.720It's literally Heidi is pressing me saying we need to have a big sort of Easter meal.
00:25:29.520You know, most Easter's I would have done like gone to church and then like gone and taken my mom out to dinner or something and done like a brunch at a restaurant.
00:25:37.960So we're obviously not going to do that.
00:25:39.720So that's that you could always have the mimosas, but you got to do it at home.
00:25:42.980You know, it's funny because I think what most people are going to do is more like what you did growing up, which is it'll be the first Easter in the pajamas.
00:25:50.320And frankly, that doesn't sound so bad.
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