Bachmann’s Anti-Gay Fervor Contributes to Mid-Campaign Crisis Thing

We are officially at the point in this bizarre campaign when absolutely every word that comes out of Michele Bachmann’s mouth is probably total bullshit. Amazingly enough, her former supporters are pulling their heads out of their asses, checking the weather, and running vigorously away from her collapsing campaign. The most recent USA Today/Gallup Poll shows Bachmann plummeting from 10 percent in August to a measly 5 percent this time around.

This morning, Bachmann plowed gamely forward with her campaign, however, visiting Amend Meatpacking Company in Des Moines, where she strolled through a room of hanging carcasses and then proceeded to put on blue gloves and slice some meat for the photographers. She waxed poetic about Obama’s excessive regulation of the meat-packing industry, which is a pretty ignorant thing to say (surprise!), as anyone who read Fast Food Nation could tell you.

Tonight, instead of watching Glee with the rest of America, she’ll be attending a Tea Party rally in Homer Glen, Illinois. Bachmann isn’t slowing down.

She seems unfazed by the abysmal past week of her campaign — starting with the backlash to her outrageous and catastrophically irresponsible claim that the HPV Vaccine causes mental retardation (Lizz is writing a separate post about that, so I won’t get into it here) which inspired even Mary Matalin (Bachmann’s co-star in the triumphant documentary film From the Heartland) to declare that Bachmann “is in perilous danger of branding herself batty.”

See also:

But let’s get into the gay stuff, shall we?

Relevant to your interests is The Minnesota Independent reporting that questions about gay rights “plagued” the candidate during her trip to California last week, most notably in the form of a Madonna Flash Mob conducted at a Bachmann event to protest her stance on LGBT issues and her Friday night appearance on The Jay Leno Show. Bachmann was just as surprised as we were when Leno popped the question —

Leno: “That whole ‘pray the gay away’ thing, I don’t get that.”
Bachmann: “When I heard that I thought it was a mid-life crisis thing, ‘pray the gray away.’”

Nobody laughed, by the way. However, more important to note is that Bachmann didn’t deny that the clinic practices reparative therapy, she merely deflected.

Leno: “To me, when I was a kid, they used to try and teach me to write right-handed, you’re left-handed, that’s the hand of the devil.… to me that’s the same thing if you’re gay. Gay marriage, why be against that? I’ve been married 31 years, first wife, very happy. Two gay guys get married, how does that affect my marriage?”
Bachmann: “The whole thing is, with clinics, whatever issue anyone has, we don’t discriminate, if they come into our clinic and somebody has an issue our therapist deal with whatever the issues are… and that’s it, it’s an ethics issue… we don’t discriminate with people’s issues.”

I wonder if they’d discriminate against someone who came in wanting to embrace their homosexuality. How would they handle a trans client going through transition and wanting advice on coming out trans to friends and family?

Leno: “I’m surprised that the Tea Party gets bogged down in these social issues –”
Bachmann: “Well they really don’t to be honest with you, the Tea Party is about fiscal conservatism and having government get its act together.”
Leno: “It sounds like two gay people wanna get married that’s their business, that doesn’t concern us. I mean, why is that even an issue?”
Bachmann: “The family is foundational and marriage between a man and a woman is what the law has been for years.”
Leno: “I tried it myself, it works great for me.”
Bachmann: “There you go.”
Leno: “I gotta admit, that’s a part I don’t get, I know gay families that are married, they have children, and they’re wonderful people, it doesn’t seem like — why they shouldn’t be allowed to be happy. But I’m not gonna change your mind on that one.”

On Monday, Bachmann said she was “very surprised [by the Leno interview] because we had had a pre-show interview and that wasn’t at all what I was told we were going to be talking about.”

So, let’s recap: Michele Bachmann doesn’t deny that her clinic practices gay conversion therapy, despite previously denying that her clinic practices gay conversion therapy and in line with evidence that her clinic practices gay conversion therapy. Bachmann’s home district in Minnesota is hosting not one but TWO lawsuits from LGBT students who were excessively bullied in school (Bachmann balked at efforts to create a “zero tolerance” bullying policy) yet when asked about anti-gay bullying last week, Bachmann dismissed the question altogether with “that’s not a federal issue.” Michele Bachmann has said in the past that homosexuality is “a sad life,” “part of Satan,”  “personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.” Michele Bachmann has said this:

“It isn’t that some gay will get some rights. It’s that everyone else in our state will lose rights. For instance, parents will lose the right to protect and direct the upbringing of their children. Because our K-​12 public school system, of which ninety per cent of all youth are in the public school system, they will be required to learn that homosexuality is normal, equal and perhaps you should try it. And that will occur immediately, that all schools will begin teaching homosexuality.”

At what point, exactly, can we add her anti-gay sentiments to the pile of crap even her own people aren’t buying anymore? At which point will she do her cause more harm than good? You know how in school they told you if you smoked pot you’d try to jump out the window and fly and when you realized they were lying about that, you thought “hm, I wonder if they were also lying about cocaine!”? Maybe that’s what will happen here.

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Riese

Riese is the 41-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

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45 Comments

  1. That packing plant should probably be thoroughly sanitized, and any meat she came into contact with should be destroyed. The last thing we need is a derpes outbreak.

  2. the leno stuff surprised me. i don’t generally pay any attention at all to jay leno or anything he says or does, so maybe that’s unfair of me. none of the bachmann stuff surprised me, which is… distressing. at least she’s dropped in the polls? if only the other candidates weren’t spewing similarly arranged piles of the same tragic garbage.

  3. Usually I can’t stand Leno, but he did a good job with that interview. And I’m really glad that no one (in the live audience (I’m sure that some homophobic fox news viewer thought it was hilarious)) laughed at her pray away the grey line.

  4. Bachmann doesn’t matter anymore. It’s Perry or Romney at this point. People who have followed politics have always known she was crazy. Now everyone else is figuring it out. I was hoping they’d figure it out only after she won the primary, but I didn’t give the GOP base enough credit, I guess.

        • I don’t think Perry can hold up to real scrutiny. He’s another George W. — he’s got swagger and comes off as a powerful, decisive leader. But he is unknowledgeable about a lot of things and has never had to deal with real and constant scrutiny. I think he will get agitated and flummoxed in no time. Romney, while completely full of shit and totally disingenuous, has been working on this for a while. I think he’s better prepared for the campaign ahead. At this point, I don’t see how Romney isn’t the nominee, but there’s a political lifetime until the primary.

          • I agree magicml, I expect Perry to implode at some point and there is a ton of time until the primary. I get miffed that the press has essentially already pared this down to a 2 person race and the rest of the candidates have been marginalized. I wouldn’t vote for any of them but I hate to see candidates like Paul and Huntsman get dismissed so long before any actual voting takes place.

  5. I’m so glad people are realizing she is cray cray and her popularity is dropping. I find the thought that someone who is described as “impulsive” potentially being in charge of over 5000 nuclear warheads very frightening.

  6. This article was articulate, well-written, and informative.

    Am I a bad person if my favorite-est part is the last little bit about pot, windows, cocaine and campaigns of misinformation?

  7. Thank god, people are finally figuring this shit out. I can hardly beleive she’s been taken seriously and been a threat for as long as she has been.

  8. BAChmann – note the nn . thats german. How many realize that a nutcase named hitler also threw gays into the ovens.

    A history of her family would be really interesting. Lots of Germans migrated to WI and Minn back in the later 1800s

    Also, we took in a lot of German prisoners during WWII to work on farms in the midwest due to having approx 24% of our male population in the mil (12 million out of about 100 M+F)

    Many who behaved properly were allowed to stay in the country and become citizens

    But culture in general doesnt change, and is passed down by parents to child

    Just wondering.

  9. I guarantee you that bachmann was put up to do all her ugliness, because it brings out the worst in people.

    Especially the extremist tea party people – helping insure they will vote – no matter which repub extremist gets selected to run against Obama.

    She may not even realize that she is being used by her own party.

  10. I know a prayed away the gay guy.

    He told me that gays support the Westboro baptist church people – those psychopaths who celebrate both the murder of gays and the deaths of our soldiers.

    Then he told me “Matthew Shepards parents should have fixed him”

    Blaming the boys parents for their sons grisly murder

    Psychopath again, but there is more

    I simply repeated back to him what he said about Matthew a minute later.

    he then denied he said it. He’s a pathological liar as well.

    Which of course is what the fixed gays actually are.

    BTW the cathollic church’s program for fixing gays is scalled Regeneration.

    the same name was used during the middle ages to convert Jews – on pain of death.

    BTW -if your catholic this may shock you but I stumbled upon the following website

    http://NOBELIEFS.COM/NAZIS.HTM

    And despite lots of looking nowhere can I find that hitler, born and baptised catholic in very catholic Austria in 1888 – was ever EXcommunicated – dead or alive.

    And was the worst murderer in history.

    • I was under the impression / understanding that the Catholic church’s official stance on homosexuality is that some people are born with a homosexual orientation and God calls those people to live a celibate life? I’m not saying that is a great position, but on the scale of whackadoodle conservative Christian stances on homosexuality, it is a much better stance than the belief of someone like Michele Bachmann. But I’m episcopal, so I could be wrong. Pope thinks so, at least. :)

  11. Ummm. Can we have Madonna Flash Dances in Bachmann’s yard everyday for a year? Perhaps we can dance the stupid away.

  12. I have feelings about Bachmann’s craziness and whatnot, but looking at that meatpacking picture at 2 am, all I can think is: put your goddamn hair up.

    • I thought I was shallow for noticing her highlights, which I hate. I just can’t even stomach her politics; I’d rather focus on something shallow instead.

  13. “We are officially at the point in this bizarre campaign when absolutely every word that comes out of Michele Bachmann’s mouth is probably total bullshit.”

    Best. hook. ever.

  14. “is in perilous danger of branding herself batty.”

    LOL I love it when people use sort of ‘formal’ words to convey what they are really trying to say – STAY THE F AWAY FROM THE MICROPHONE YOU SOUND BATSHIT CRAZY

  15. Michelle Bachmann is nuts, but if she can be so off-the-chart nuts that she gets even Jay Leno to defend gay marriage on the teevee, that’s pretty cool. Long after Bachmann gets a reality show about playing with meat and battling Satan and then passes into obscurity, opinions will still be changing in favor of equality.

  16. Can we please have a jello (or creamed corn) wrestle-off between Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Christine O’Donnell??? That is maybe the only venue I can imagine appropriate for that trinity of insanity (Also, true confession, I do kind of think Sarah Palin might be hot in a bikini. And I don’t feel guilty objectifying her because she is cray-cray-crayzay).

    • YES PLEASE Michele Bachmann would look so hot!! And I’m imagining Mr. Bachmann hitting it off and hitting on Todd at the sidelines. Beside a moose. Who’s eating a hot dog. With O’Donnell wearing a paper hat somehow. Drunk and rattling off with an Irish accent.

  17. So, in America: a politician can base all their reason on religious beliefs, have seemingly no mind for policy or economics, outright LIE and not even do research to try and make in convincing, make an obvious stance that displays not only an inability to represent minorities in your own country, but outright discriminate against them…and you not only get a platform to give this views, but A FUCKING CAMPAIGN?!
    JESUS. This whole “complete freedom of speech” thing seems a little overrated!

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