'Absolutely not against the gays' (*just against Satan, of which she claims gaynesss is part)

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07/18/2011

by Jeremy Hooper

In the LGBT rights conversation, these are the kinds of comments that really get to me:

“[The Bachmanns] are absolutely not against the gays,” said one close friend, JoAnne Hood, who also attends Eagle Brook. “They are just not for marriage.”
[SOURCE: NYT]

Gets to me, because it's so empirically untrue. Perhaps it's personally true. Personally, the Bachmanns might be throwing jubilant coming out parties for their gay friends every time a "Glee" episode airs, which may be the Bachmann actions that Hood (a former neighbor) knows. But publicly and politically (i.e. what matters here), the Bachmann canon goes WELL beyond marriage and right into the heart of anti-gaydom.

As part of her political efforts, Michele Bachmann has called the "sexual dysfunction" of gayness "part of Satan, I think." She also once accused MN state senators who didn't vote for her marriage amendment of acting like soldiers whose complacency led to the Pearl Harbor tragedy. As an advocate for the scientifically-repudiated idea that gays can and should "change", Bachmann provided a blurb for "ex-gay" Janet Boyne's book -- one where she framed Boynes' "change" as freedom "from the bondage of sin." And she's contributed a host of other hostile comments that cut right into the cores of gay people's beings, from claiming that same-sex marriage legalizes "sexual anarchy" to declaring that “If you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement." If this is not an example of a public figure acting "against the gays," then seriously -- what is?!

So back to the NYT quote: Why even include it in a report on the Congresswoman? It is cover. It is filler. It is unsupported by the body of fact -- a lack of support that is in no way strengthened by a former neighbor's good affections.

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