Watch: Ted Cruz Says Supreme Court's 2015 Marriage Equality Ruling 'Clearly Wrong'

Sen. Ted Cruz echoed Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas with remarks he made July 16 to the effect that the Court was "clearly wrong" in striking down barriers to marriage equality in 2015, according to NBC News.

"The remarks from Cruz, who has been open about his interest in another presidential run, came just weeks after the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion," NBC detailed, going on to recall that Justice Clarence Thomas "argued in his concurring Roe opinion that the Court 'should reconsider' past rulings including... opinions that protected the right to same-sex intimacy and contraception."

Cruz made the remarks on the July 16 edition of his podcast when discussing the 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which ushered in marriage equality on a national level and abolished the state-by-state patchwork of legal rights available to same-sex families. Cruz patterned his comments on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's argument that abortion rights are not "deeply rooted in this nation's history."

"Obergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation's history," Cruz parroted, according to CNN. "Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. We saw states before Obergefell – some states were moving to allow gay marriage, other states were moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that the states were adopting," Cruz said.

While the "states' rights" argument remains popular among those who defend the Court's rollback of women's Constitutional protections, there is, at the same time, a push among Republican lawmakers to take the matter of abortion out of the hands of state legislatures by imposing a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks.

But Cruz also opined that the Court is unlikely to follow up its reversal of Roe by undoing equal marriage rights, noting that "what the Supreme Court said [in repealing abortion rights] is 'Roe is different because it's the only one of the cases that involves the taking of a human life and it's qualitatively different,'" Newsweek reported. "I agree with that proposition," Cruz said.

The Texas senator went on to say that marriage equality is also different because so many same-sex families now participate in marriage and its more than 1,000 granted rights and protections. "You've got a ton of people who have entered into gay marriages and it would be more than a little chaotic for the Court to do something that somehow disrupted those marriages that have been entered into in accordance with the law," Cruz noted.

A 2019 report from the U.S. Census Bureau put the number of married same-sex couples in the United States at over half a million. But that number may now be sharply increasing. The Court's recent decision to rescind women's reproductive rights has reportedly spurred more same-sex families to formalize their relationships through legal marriage while that right remains within their grasp.

Watch a clip from Cruz's podcast in which he discusses Roe and Obergefell, below.