"Last I checked, we don't have a rubber shortage in America," Cruz exasperatingly said to the rather boisterous crowd. "Like look, when I was in college, we had a machine in the bathroom. You put 50 cents in -- and voila!"
Cruz added that he expects Hillary Clinton to run against "the condom police" in order to "try to scare a bunch of folks that are not paying a lot of attention into thinking someone's going to steal their birth control."
And if there were only one form of birth control available to American consumers, Cruz would almost have a credible point. At the Iowa event, the senator said he's never met "any conservative who wants to ban contraceptives" -- Cruz might want to chat with Rick Santorum -- but the Texan's focus was exclusively on condoms.
Cruz is right that there is no "rubber shortage." What he's wrong about is, well, literally everything else.
Mitt Romney scoffed at the very idea, responding, "I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care or not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives."
Romney seemed repulsed by Obama's description of Romney's own position, but the truth of the matter was that both the Republican nominee and his running mate endorsed a policy that would leave contraception decisions for millions of workers in the hands of employers.
Cruz's posture is similar, in that he seems baffled by Democratic rhetoric. If condoms are readily available, and there's no meaningful effort to restrict their sales, why in the world are Democrats always running around complaining about a "war on women" and Republican hostility towards contraception?
The answer, of course, is that there are other forms of contraception, and women's access to them would be curtailed by the GOP agenda.
Cruz really ought to know this. He not only personally voted against a measure to protect workers' access to contraception, regardless of possible objections from their employers, but Cruz has also argued that he considers birth-control pills "abortifacients."
What's more, the Texas senator has endorsed a "Personhood" policy, which would have the practical effect of banning common forms of birth control.
In other words, Cruz would have voters believe that the entire issue is "nonsense" because Republicans aren't actively trying to limit access to condoms, which necessarily means, in his mind, that there is no "war on women." But the GOP senator is inadvertently proving his critics' point with a myopic understanding of what contraception even is.