http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2016/04/18/3770337/ted-cruz-discrimination-gma/

Todd Calogne, a pizza parlor owner in New York City, began his question by telling the Republican presidential candidate that he’s a “lifelong Republican” who has been married to his husband for two years. “I’ve noticed a lot of ‘religious freedom’ laws and somewhat institutionalized discrimination laws happening around the country,” he said, likely referring to anti-LGBT laws passed in North Carolina and Mississippi and proposed in many other states. “What would you as President do to protect me and my husband from that institutionalized discrimination?”

Cruz refused to actually entertain that question — or even humor its premise — a total of three times after anchors Robin Roberts and George Stephanopoulos tried to push him further. Instead, he repeatedly insisted that “religious liberty” simply protects everybody. “That freedom ultimately protects each and every one of us,” he claimed. “We shouldn’t have the right to force others to knuckle under and give up their faith, give up their belief. For me, I have spent my entire adult life fighting to defend religious liberty, fighting to defend the freedom of every one of us to seek out and worship God, and I think keeping government out of the way of your lives protects the freedom of every one of us.”

Roberts was the first to try to get more out of him. “But when you talk about freedom — what he referred to with his husband — a lot of people would say, doesn’t everybody have the freedom to be treated equally, don’t we all have the freedom to be equal?”

Cruz again avoided any acknowledgment that same-sex couples like the questioner could experience discrimination under these laws. Instead, he suggested it simply protects an Orthodox Jew from the government mandating what a Kosher deli can serve, an analogy that is purely hypothetical — no deli has ever been forced to serve anything, and why would it? — and irrelevant to the question. It’s never been an issue of what any business sells on its menu, but merely a question of to whom it is willing to sell those items.