This just in from The Nation:
In the summer of 2004, Andrew Ramirez, who was just about to enter his senior year of high school, worked up the nerve to tell his family he was gay. His mother took the news in stride, but his stepfather, a conservative Christian, was outraged. “He said it was wrong, an abomination, that it was something he would not tolerate in his house,” Ramirez recalls. A few weeks later, his parents marched him into the office of Bachmann & Associates, a Christian counseling center in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, which is owned by Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus. From the outset, Ramirez says, his therapist—one of roughly twenty employed at the Lake Elmo clinic—made it clear that renouncing his sexual orientation was the only moral choice. “He basically said being gay was not an acceptable lifestyle in God’s eyes,” Ramirez recalls. According to Ramirez, his therapist then set about trying to “cure” him. Among other things, he urged Ramirez to pray and read the Bible, particularly verses that cast homosexuality as an abomination, and referred him to a local church for people who had given up the “gay lifestyle.” He even offered to set Ramirez up with an ex-lesbian mentor.
Ramirez was not impressed. After his second appointment, he resolved not to go back, despite the turmoil it might cause in his family. “I didn’t feel it was something that I wanted to change, and I didn’t think it could be changed,” he says. “I was OK with who I was.”
As Republican presidential contender Michele Bachmann has surged in the polls, the spotlight has turned on her husband and main political adviser, Marcus Bachmann, who has a PhD in clinical psychology and owns two Christian counseling centers in Minnesota. There has been a great deal of speculation that his clinics, which have received $161,000 in state and federal funding, try to cure homosexuality—and the chatter has only grown louder since his comments likening gays to “barbarians” who “need to be educated” and “disciplined” surfaced in the blogosphere last week. Marcus Bachmann has denied these allegations. “That’s a false statement,” he replied when the Minneapolis City Pages asked if his clinic tried to cure gays. And until now there was no firm evidence to back these allegations up. But information obtained by The Nation suggests that Bachmann & Associates therapists do, in fact, try to change sexual orientation. (Emphasis mine.) It also sheds new light on the Bachmanns’ embrace of the controversial ex-gay movement and related psychological approaches, which portray homosexuality as a disease to be rooted out.
Michael Rogers, Managing Editor of Raw Story and Michelle Goldberg of The Daily Beast were guests on The Ed show on Thursday evening with host Ed Schultz, and the Bachmann clinics were their main point of discussion:
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
DR. MARCUS BACHMANN, REP. BACHMANN`S HUSBAND: We have to understand barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. And just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn`t mean that we`re supposed to go down that road. That`s what`s called the sinful nature.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
SCHULTZ: Barbarians.
Joining me now is Michelle Goldberg. She`s a senior contributing writer at "The Daily Beast" and author of "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism." And Mike Rogers, managing editor of RawStory.com
Great to have both of you with us tonight.
Michelle, are there things that we don`t know about Michele Bachmann that we`re going to find out?
MICHELLE GOLDBERG, THE DAILY BEAST: I think that we are slowly finding unite just how extreme both of them are and how rooted they are in a fundamentalist subculture, that is probably not a minority among the Republican Party, it`s certainly foreign to much of the United States, you know? So, some of this really vitriolic language they`ve used about gay people.
You know, Michele Bachmann in one of her speeches in 2006 talked about Melissa Etheridge`s breast cancer as perhaps an opportunity for her to rethink her sexuality and turn toward spiritual things. So, for many, many years, Michele Bachmann has built her career on gay bashing, basically, and particularly on opposition to gay marriage.
SCHULTZ: Do you think she`ll continue on this path now that she`s getting on a higher level of visibility and her name recognition continues to grow?
GOLDBERG: I think that she has nothing to gain by stressing that aspect of her ideology on the public stage. I think there`s absolutely no doubt that if God forbid she did become president of the United States, she would pursue that agenda vigorously.
SCHULTZ: Yes.
Mike Rogers, you barbarian.
(LAUGHTER)
SCHULTZ: What do you make of this, Dr. Marcus Bachmann? Can he continue to play such a key role in her campaign with this kind of conversation taking place? What do you think?
MIKE ROGERS, RAWSTORY.COM: I don`t think he will, and I think it`s going to come back to bite him for a number of reasons, of course. His therapy center receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funding from Medicare. So, right there you have a disconnect between the candidate who doesn`t believe in all of this, and then here`s her husband who`s accepting all this public money to perform what he would call or folks would call ex-gay therapy, which, of course, is very dangerous to individuals.
He acknowledges in that audio we don`t act on these things. We don`t have to go on that road. So, who is we, Dr. Bachmann? And that`s what I`d like to ask him and talk to him in person and say, what are you talking about, we?
SCHULTZ: Mike, is this going to create a problem for the Republican Party? I mean, it would seem to me that other candidates who are in competition to get the nomination, seeing the surge that Bachmann is having may consider coming out talking against her position which is so radical and against the mainstream. Would this be a problem for the Republicans?
ROGERS: I think it will be. I think we just saw in New York state, a Republican state Senate hand marriage equality to the state -- 19 million more people now eligible to get married, courtesy of the Republican Party who let that vote happened.
So, I think she`s so out of step with the rest of the Republican Party who have coming to grips with the fact that this progress has been made so successfully in such a short amount of time that she will find herself in a position where she`ll be turning off more voters than she`ll be gaining.
SCHULTZ: Here`s the dangerous thing about Michele Bachmann in my opinion. During the debate, I mean, she talked about Obamacare, is what she called it -- said that she would repeal it, you could take it to the bank, it was going to happen, she made that very clear. Mike, how do we know she doesn`t feel this way about an anti-gay agenda?
ROGERS: Well, one of the things she`s been careful to do is talk about state by state and it`s up to each state. She probably knows that she`ll never be able to pass a constitutional amendment. That scares her so she`ll keep working that angle. But at the same time she will go after that agenda and her husband become a wealthy man off of it.
So, these contradictions will keep coming up for her, I think it`s going to cause her a lot of problems.
SCHULTZ: Michelle Goldberg, you know, Michelle Obama was criticized by some for statements while campaigning for her husband. I mean, is Marcus Bachmann is going to get the same treatment?
GOLDBERG: To be honest, I think he deserves more of that treatment than Michelle Obama does, because one thing Michele Bachmann has said, she believes in a fundamentalist model of marriage. She believes he is the head of family and she needs to be submissive to him.
So, his views have more of a bearing on the kind of president she would be than other candidates` spouses do.
SCHULTZ: I think that other candidates are going to be more mainstream. I mean, I think this is going to be a problem for Mitt Romney.
GOLDBERG: Yes. But she`s in a difficult position, because, you know, while Mike is certainly right, that we have Republicans here in New York who fought for marriage equality. On the hole, the Republican Party, especially in the red states, is dominated by extreme social conservatives. So, anybody who wants to attack Michele Bachmann from the right is going to have a difficult time in a party whose philosophy is no enemies to the right.
SCHULTZ: I`ll be shock if she doesn`t win Iowa. I mean, I believe that she is going to win Iowa.
And, if you can take any more of the insanity of it all, from Sandi Behrns "Michele Bachmann Agrees: Black Children Were Better Off Under Slavery."