My dear Gaymericans, it has come to my attention that there is some concern about a woman named Michele Bachmann. The scuttlebutt is that she’s antigay and possibly insane and that, should the End of Days occur and she become President of the United States, LGBT people would be in very serious trouble.
I’m here today to assure you that Bachmann does not judge. She said so herself on “Meet the Press.” She said it right to David Gregory’s face. And you can’t lie to a man with a face like that. I mean, look at him. He looks like a silver-haired Labrador retriever puppy in a necktie. Not even Michele Bachmann would lie to a dog wearing a tie.
But she might evade his questions. Which she did, though her unwillingness to stand by her past comments about lesbian and gay people only proves how nonjudgmental she truly is in her heart and her soul.
“I am running for the presidency of the United States. I am not running to be anyone’s judge,” Bachmann told Gregory. “I ascribe honor and dignity to every person no matter what their background. [Gays and lesbians] have honor and they have dignity.”
See? Homos have honor and dignity. So kind of her to notice. But for some reason, Gregory just wouldn’t let the whole “you’ve said super-shitty things about gay people in the past” thing go. He dragged out comments she made in 2004, like when she called being gay “a very sad life” that’s “part of Satan.”
She also said, “It leads to the personal enslavement of individuals. Because if you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement. And that’s why this is so dangerous.”
Um, OK. I can see how she might think that bondage is dangerous, though it might just be that her only experience with bondage is that scene from “Pulp Fiction.” Still, enough with the bondage talk, lady.
Oh, and, “we need to have profound compassion for people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life, and sexual-identity disorders.”
But, I mean, so what? That was then and this is now. She’s not judging gays now, end of story. Well, I mean, there is that whole issue of Bachmann’s staunch support of the antigay marriage amendment to the Constitution. And the weird thing about her husband running a mental-health clinic that tries to “cure” gays with prayer.
And then there’s that “Marriage Vow” she signed in Iowa that, among many other things, affirms her “vigorous opposition to any redefinition of the Institution of Marriage — faithful monogamy between one man and one woman — through statutory-, bureaucratic- or court-imposed recognition of intimate unions which are bigamous, polygamous, polyandrous, same-sex, etc.”
For example, can we really hold it against her that her straw-poll win in Iowa is largely credited to “Christian” GOP organizer Peter Waldron, who happens to have ties to Bishop Martin Ssempa, who happens to be one of the main proponents of the “kill the gays bill,” a measure that seeks to make homosexuality punishable by death in Uganda?
But hey, we’re talking about a woman who considers John Eidsmoe, her professor at Oral Roberts University, a mentor. Eidsmoe’s views about homosexuality are extreme, to say the least. As Right Wing Watch points out, this guy is a big believer in ex-gay therapy and thinks that gays are out to destroy society and “will recruit our children into homosexuality, voluntarily or involuntarily.”
This is, of course, utter bullshit, as any sensible person knows. But we’re not talking about a sensible person here. We’re talking about Michele Bachmann, so it’s only fair that the standard not be so high.
D’Anne Witkowski has been gay for pay since 2003. She’s a freelance writer and poet (believe it!). When she’s not taking on the creeps of the world, she reviews rock ’n’ roll shows in Detroit with her twin sister.