Speaking at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation and CNN’s presidential town hall event Thursday night, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has been surging in the polls and looking more and more like the emerging frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, insulted men of faith, implying that they would never find a woman who would marry them.
Morgan Cox, Chair of the Human Rights Campaign’s Board of Directors, asked Warren, “Let’s say you’re on the campaign trail and you’re approached—” Warren interrupted, “I have been.” Cox finished, “You have been, yes. And a supporter approaches you and says, ‘Senator, I’m old-fashioned, and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.’ What is your response?”
First, Warren assumed that only a man of faith would believe in Biblical values and that a woman of faith would not take Biblical injunctions seriously, as she replied, “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that.” She continued, “And I’m gonna say, ‘Then just marry one woman.’”
As the crowd laughed and applauded, Warren jibed, “I’m cool with that.” The crowd gave a sustained ovation, prompting Warren, trying for one last zinger, to add bitingly, “Assuming you can find one.”
Elizabeth Warren was asked how she would respond to a person who says that marriage is "between one man and one woman"
"I'm going to assume it's a guy who said that, and I will say, then just marry one woman. … Assuming you can find one," Warren said. #EqualityTownHall pic.twitter.com/RAuVqch7Ls
— CNN (@CNN) October 11, 2019
Later, Warren ripped people of faith again, saying, “The hatefulness, frankly, always really shocked me. Especially for people of faith because I think the foundation is the worth of every single human being. And I get people may make decisions for themselves that are different than the decisions other people make, but by golly, those are decisions about you; they are not decisions that tell other people what they can and cannot do.”
Warren’s contempt for men of faith would seem to be at odds with her take on the parable in the Bible of the sheep and the goats; she told Reverend Bernice King, the daughter of the Dr, Martin Luther King Jr., “And the way I hear that is that, he’s saying to us first, there’s God in every one of us. There’s Jesus in every one of us. However you see it in your religion, but that inside there’s something holy, in every single person. And the second thing he’s saying, is: ‘And I call on you to act, not to sit back and proclaim your faith, but to get up and to make a difference.’ And the third thing I hear him saying, is: ‘And it is every one of you. When the final day comes, that every one of you will be judged by what you did for the God in others’.”
Warren also supports the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would protect access to abortion from “bans on abortion prior to viability that are a direct violation of constitutional rights confirmed by Roe v. Wade, requirements that doctors provide medically inaccurate and, at times, false information to people seeking abortion care, and restrictions on the ability to safely access medication abortion in the earliest weeks of pregnancy.”
That wouldn’t fly with the same men of faith that Warren contemptuously dismisses.