Ted Cruz (Sarah Palin in a suit) took some time from his busy schedule of oppressing people this week to remind some Christian Iowegians that "there is no liberty more important than religious liberty."

What about gun liberty, Ted? Are you trying to say that Jesus is better than a gun? Shaky ground, Teddy. That's the kind of thing you expect to hear from that communist, dress-wearin' pope. That's not Iowa talk. That's not Texas talk. That's not gun-show talk.

Never mind that maybe half the voters under 25 don't believe in ANY kind of god or, if they do, it's some weird, spiritual yang-yang about Buddha or Wicca or Kabbalah.

Ya still gotta go for the god vote because that, and guns, is what the Republicans have left. Well, that and trying to choke a couple hundred bucks worth of food stamps out of some single mother. Give her some Jesus, instead. Give her a gun. Better yet, yap about "freedom" when her second-grader gets greased in a school shooting. Hey, she's got no wedding ring, so her kid's a bastard, right? Ask Jesus. He's at the gun show, checking out the Glock pistols. He's back and they ain't gettin' him up on ANOTHER cross. He's a Jew, but he's gonna stand his ground.

In America, you have an ever-declining number of people who give a damn about who prays to what and the Republicans keep pitching their message straight at those folks, people they already own. Keep pitching to those people, and you're going where Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin went.

Cruz, who is "courtesy white" because he's evangelical, longs for a "traditional America" he's too young to remember.

I remember, and I can tell you that people named "Cruz" didn't get elected to anything in traditional America. If Cruz ever becomes president, he won't be following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan, he'll be walking ground broken by Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr.

But "there is no liberty more important than religious liberty," says Cruz, who sure as hell doesn't want to start promising people jobs, or decent wages, or a financial system not based on the Viking model, which is "loot the best and burn the rest."

There's a church at the end of my street. I can go there whenever I want. No one tries to stop me. Not ever. And there's a synagogue maybe 15 blocks away and I can go there, too. There's a Buddhist temple up the hill from me. I live in a city, we got all kinds of people here, and they all have to eat. Every day. Many of us deserted from the culture war because we're too damn hungry to fight or we're busy working two jobs.

Jesus we can find ourselves. He's never been far away, and no one is stopping us from looking for him.

We need work. We need security. We need a ladder up out of poverty.

Jesus we already got.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's collection of columns, "Between Wealth and Welfare," is available in Amazon.com.