When asked about gay rights in an interview with New Hampshire's Concord Monitor, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann refused to answer. "I'm not involved in light, frivolous matters," she said. "I'm not involved in fringe or side issues. I'm involved in serious issues."
Waterlogged in said seriousness up to her glassy eyeballs, Bachmann is also filled with a hubris that goes through the roof, adopting a novel way of campaigning: answering only questions she feels like answering, as if her past record doesn't exist. She first debuted this modus operandi while being interviewed by the likes of Chris Matthews, who became so visibly aggravated with her non-answers he asked if she had been hypnotized. Repeating this technique with every interviewer, she just bulldozes through her vapid prepared remarks, her eyes ever more glazed until resembling a resident of Village Of The Damned.
For someone not involved in "fringe" issues like gay rights, she sure has spent a great deal of her political career obsessed with said fringe issues, including leading the charge for a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality in Minnesota. She has made inflammatory anti-gay statements at every available opportunity, including whoppers like "It's part of Satan I think to say that this is "gay." It's anything but gay," and "If you're involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it's bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement."
In 2009, Bachmann helped raise funds for You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International, a Christian youth ministry in her district founded by Bradlee Dean, an anti-gay, Obama hating preacher so extreme his invocation at the Minnesota legislature embarrassed even Republicans. Dean makes Rev. Jeremiah Wright look like Julie Andrews.
Bachmann and her husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann, own the clinic Bachmann and Associates, a Christian counseling service that offers "Biblical world-view counselors," who "reach out and try to bring the medicine of the Gospel to come and heal people." The clinic offers "reparative therapy" for gays, a widely discredited technique whereby the patient attempts to "pray away the gay," among other therapies. Proponents of these techniques have carted out a few testimonials from satisfied customers who claim to no longer be gay through the power of Christ, but most experts agree that they have merely changed their behavior, not their actual orientation. Michele refuses to answer questions about this, saying (and I'm paraphrasing), "I am running for president, my husband is not, our business is not, and I will be happy to answer questions that won't remind you of my record as one of the most virulent homophobes on the planet."
She attends church services where preachers make anti-gay sermons, and speaks to anti-gay broadcasters with a long history of idiotic rhetoric. And she practically wet herself to be the first to sign anti-gay pledges proffered by the Iowa Family Council and National Organization for Marriage, vowing to appoint conservative anti-gay justices and basically do everything possible to ruin the lives of gay people.
At some point, Bachmann is going to have to realize that she is the one who can run but can't hide from her record, no matter how hard she tries to maintain a Stepford Wife persona who only answers what she wants. And here it's her anti-gay views themselves, as well as those of the right wing hate groups she endorses, that are the very issues that have become "fringe," not the other way around. The vast majority of Americans approve of gay equality, with a slight majority endorsing marriage equality. It is Bachmann who is on the fringe, and she is in for a rude awakening when she realizes it, if she ever does, which is doubtful. She doesn't realize much, except the right wing nonsense she and her followers espouse.
And any gay person would be happy to clue Bachmann in that their rights as citizens, and their lives, are not "frivolous" or "side" issues. She insults millions of Americans and their families with statements like these, proving that not only is she willfully ignorant of the lives and needs of Americans, she doesn't even represent mainstream Christians, most of whom are not gay-hating nutbags.
It is Bachmann's own presidential campaign, and entire political career, that is frivolous.
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Why can't Bachmann mind her own business?
Just make it legal federally and everyone can mind their own business.
Civil rights should never-ever-ever be left up to the majority of each state.
Imagine all the people who wouldn't have many or no rights at all had it been that way.
The issue of gay-marriage is no differant from interracial marriage , racial equality, women's rights, et al .
Majority rule isn't supposed to be part of the American way of life. It's unconstitutional.
Mrs Bachman, stuff it..and have a BLESSED DAY
Her avoidance to answer simple questions on "Meet the Press" this morning was a perfect example, when confronted with her past record of being a rabidly anti-gay politician who ties all her hatred back to her religion -- she refused to answer a single question. She wouldn't even admit that she doesn't consider LGBT people with children a valid family. The concept of people like her running our country is truly terrifying. When did we become such a nation of bigots, intolerant sheep and homophobes?
I'm not a huge fan of Obama, but lemme tell ya - I'd vote for him in a second over someone who can't even answer a single question and likes to legalize hatred against whatever group her "higher power" tells her to this week.
Since you try to adhere so well to the Bible, I hope that you follow these rules as well:
Don't wear clothes of more than one fabric. (Leviticus)
When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is bloody, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. (Leviticus) It also goes on to say that if a menstruating woman touches any object it will be unclean until the evening and no one else may touch, lest they become unclean.
So I sincerely hope that when your time of the month comes, you stay isolated in the corner of your room for seven days. For the Bible tells you so.
I couldn't care less about being married in a church. All I want is the same rights and recognition that are conferred on others in a ceremony that takes less than a minute to perform.
Too many on the far right are confusing civil marriage with religious marriage. Historically, marriage was a contract between two families for sharing assets and responsibilites. It wasn't until religions realized that there was money to be made in the marriage business that it became divinely inspired by God.
- Marriage at its core is a contract that defines property rights and has not changed in this over time. Who can marry has varied wildly over time. It did not originate w/any one religion and in fact the RCC didn't mandate it until the 1500s as a way to combat the Protestant reformation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage#Europe
http://marriage.about.com/cs/generalhistory/a/marriagehistory.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage
- Biblical marriage chart: http://i.imgur.com/4BWCh.jpg
Pray away the gay? OMG how much more transparent must it be?
Dick Cheney on gay marriage: “Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it’s an issue our family is very familiar with,” Cheney told an audience that included his daughter. “With the respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone. ... People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to." Barry Goldwater on gay rights: "Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar. You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight."
Would you classify staunch Conservatives like Dick Cheney and Barry Goldwarter as "extreme liberals?" What thoughts do you have about Republicans like Cheney and Goldwater who have similar views to President Obama about issues related to rights for gays and lesbians?
As of matter of fact, I do have a few friends & some acquaintances who are gay/lesbian. We can/do enjoy each other's company w/o getting into the polemics of gay "marriage" & the fact that the Creator never designed 2 of the same sex to be together. He, in fact, condemns such behavior, later on in Genesis. I simply cannot support something for those who are of a different persuasion that God created & never intended them to have--marriage.
Why would you expect Cheney to have a different attitude if he has a lesbian daughter? He & Goldwater are conservatives, just not on this issue, as am I. Gays can enter into any kind of relationship they want to other than the 1 God made for man & woman--marriage is reserved for them until God changes His mind & institutes marriage for homosexuals.
I see 0 reason why gays can't serve in military. Do not support any kind of job, education, housing, medical care, or civil rights discrimination/denials against gays, with the exception of adopting children; I disagree that they should be allowed to do so.
0-bama is a liberal. Enough said