This week I described the morality pledge that Republican Presidential candidates are being asked to sign. It includes promises to oppose abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage, and non-monogamy, and to promote large families. As a bonus, candidates pledge to be faithful to their spouses.
I reported that Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann had already signed.
Now it seems that Bachmann’s husband Marcus is a psychologist, and that together they own and operate a counseling clinic in Minnesota. Let’s overlook the extraordinary hypocrisy that they’ve collected over $100,000 in government subsidies for the clinic-—while Michelle is making her career by damning all government spending on anything except the military and the defense of heterosexual marriage.
Instead, let’s look at the investigative report aired on ABC News, detailing what goes on in the Bachmann Clinic. It seems that this state-licensed clinic, operated by Michelle’s state-licensed husband, is enthusiastically offering to “cure” gays of their homosexuality—-through faith-healing.
In this clip, we see former patients discussing their “treatment,” and the result of undercover cameras recording sessions. Patients are told how “normal” people are hard-wired to be heterosexual, which gays can supposedly recapture through prayer and related activities.
According to almost every mainstream professional psychological association these are totally unacceptable diagnostic and treatment procedures. In fact, “This is so far outside the mainstream it’s practically on Mars,” says psychiatrist Dr. Jack Drescher, an expert on attempts at gay conversion.
When asked about the highly unethical, potentially dangerous, and discredited faith healing done at the clinic-—based on outdated and ideological assumptions about sexual orientation-—Bachmann said she couldn’t comment because she was too busy “focusing on jobs and the economy.” But she wasn’t too busy focusing on that stuff to sign a campaign pledge centered on the issues of sexual lifestyle and privacy. According to this campaign pledge, President Bachmann will focus on such non-economic issues as abortion, same-sex marriage, monogamy, contraception, and pornography. While candidate Bachmann talks about jobs, apparently President Bachmann will focus on Americans’ sex lives.
So what is it candidate Michelle? Are you going to focus on something real-—the economy-—or on something strictly symbolic and opportunistic? If you had integrity and were consistent, wouldn’t you say much of what’s in that pledge is none of the government’s damn business?
To the sexually illiterate, everything is about sex. And once again, we see that the tea party wants to shrink government smaller and smaller until it can fit underneath your bedroom door.
(For an entertaining and scathing criticism of the Republican morality pledge, see Whoopi Goldberg here on The View.)