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.