NASHVILLE — Republican Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is rejecting a call to drop an anti-Shariah activist as his state chairman for Tennessee.Kevin Kookogey, a former chairman of the Williamson County GOP, once criticized Republican Gov. Bill Haslam over the role of a Muslim staffer and a council that has advised two state departments on Islamic affairs.He presided over the 2012 passage of a resolution that said the governor had extended “preferential political status to Shariah adherents in Tennessee, thereby aiding and abetting the advancement of an ideology and doctrine which is wholly incompatible with the Constitution of the United States and the Tennessee Constitution.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations urged Kookogey’s removal as Cruz’s Tennessee chairman, saying that keeping him in place would serve as what the group called “an endorsement of anti-Muslim hate.” Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier in an email called it “completely absurd to assert that defending American law under the U.S.