Perhaps one of the most alarming realizations about Michele Bachmann is that even if she hand never a member of Congress and a Republican presidential contender, we would probably still be writing about her here on Right Wing Watch because she is, at heart, a hardcore Religious Right activist.
Tim Murphy of Mother Jones has a new profile of Bachmann which, I feel, perfectly demonstrates that point:
There was one issue that seemed to consume Bachmann. The slow creep of the gay rights movement was, in her words, an “earthquake issue,” with the potential to shake the foundation of society itself: the family. Taking a page from Schaeffer, who vilified the “rampant sexuality” and moral relativism of the Romans, Bachmann saw the gay rights movement as a secular ideology that posed a direct challenge to traditional marriages.
As she’d done before with the Profile of Learning, Bachmann embraced her role as a messenger. When EdWatch, as the Maple River Education Coalition was later known, invited her to deliver a speech at its 2004 convention, she unleashed a masterful presentation, mixing slides with self-deprecating humor, that hammered home the same urgent message that has since become familiar to a national audience: The forces working against you are bigger than you think.
Bachmann ripped into pop culture, telling her audience about a dangerous show she’d discovered called Sex and the City. (“It’s received critical acclaim,” she said, “so that tells you, ‘Don’t watch it.'”) She warned that The Lion King soundtrack was potentially toxic to small children because it was written by Elton John, a gay man. She urged her audience to pray for Melissa Etheridge, suggesting that the lesbian songwriter’s breast cancer diagnosis might be a wake-up call for her to turn away from her sinful lifestyle. To Bachmann, homosexuals had even usurped the English language. “It’s part of Satan, I think, to say that this is ‘gay,'” she said. “It’s anything but gay.”
The Bachmanns worked as a tag team. In 2005, they both participated in the Minnesota Pastors’ Summit, a conference sponsored by the Minnesota Family Council that was designed to train religious leaders for the culture wars. Michele led a session on a state gay marriage amendment; Marcus, in a rare moment of public activism, moderated a talk called “The Truth of the Homosexual Lifestyle.”
Imagine if Sally Kern or Janet Porter were not only running for president but winning the Iowa Straw Poll and being treated like a front-runner and you start to get an idea of just how truly amazing/terrifying this development is.
