Scott Spiegel

Maybe Michele Bachmann is reluctant to elaborate on her views on homosexuality with reporters because—gasp!—she doesn’t care.

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, host Dick Gregory badgered Bachmann about comments she had made seven years ago on her interpretation of the Bible’s statements on homosexuality.

Since 2004, the country has radically evolved in its understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, including its approval of same-sex couples getting married and adopting.  Gay marriage is legal in six states plus D.C. and available to 11% of the country’s population.  Gay marriage was used as a wedge issue in many states in the 2004 Congressional elections, but in 2008 it was used as such primarily in the context of California’s Proposition 8.  Prominent Republicans who now support same-sex marriage include Dick Cheney, Laura and Barbara Bush, Cindy and Meghan McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, S. E. Cupp, Margaret Hoover, Ted Olsen, and Vaughn Walker.  Countless other prominent Republicans favor gay civil unions; most didn’t back in 2004.  Even Ann Coulter was recently appointed Honorary Chair of the Advisory Council for gay conservative group GOProud.

Bachmann’s views on gay issues have also presumably evolved since 2004, or else she would have racked up a lot more anti-gay statements since then.  All of the Bachmann homosexuality quotes the media have been broadcasting appear to have emanated from just two sources: a two-part March 2004 interview she gave on the local Minnesota radio program “Prophetic Views Behind The News” and a November 2004 address she delivered at the EdWatch National Education Conference.  That’s it.  If Bachmann had truly been waging an anti-gay jihad for the past seven years, liberals wouldn’t have had to dig up archives of obscure evangelical talk shows and one-off education conferences from George W. Bush’s first term to find recordings of self-incriminating statements.

Bachmann’s position on gay marriage roughly mirrors President Obama’s.  Like Republicans Rick Perry and Herman Cain, she prefers allowing states to implement gay marriage if they choose—a position even Obama has barely uttered his support for.  She favors a constitutional amendment defining marriage as opposite-sex, which Obama opposes—though she well knows that such an amendment has little chance of becoming law.

If Bachmann weren’t too polite to share it, her response to repeated questions on her views on homosexuality would be, “Oh, God… not again.  Really?”

Bachmann clearly cares first and foremost about federal spending and national defense.  She became a conservative rock star two years ago as the most prominent elected official to spearhead the nascent Tea Party movement, with its primary goal of stopping ObamaCare and runaway government spending.  She has voiced vociferous, well-informed support of Israel and our military missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran to stop the threat of Islamic terrorism to the U.S.  These are the things that keep her awake at night—not whether Ellen DeGeneres gets a marriage license instead of a domestic partnership.

On Meet the Press, Bachmann addressed Gregory’s questions on homosexuality by insisting that she is not one to “judge” anyone.  She affirmed that she would not use sexual orientation as a criterion in hiring for positions in her administration or for judgeships.  Why wasn’t that a good enough answer for Gregory, who continued to hound her on her theory of human sexuality?  What was she supposed to do—declare herself a True Blood fan and invite Gregory out for cosmos?  Why don’t reporters grill Obama about his opposition to gay marriage, bludgeoning him with the same boring questions and refusing to accept his self-protective platitudes on his eternally “evolving” stance?

Liberals call Bachmann a hypocrite and claim they object to her “double-talk” and dodging questions.  They declare that they would have more respect for her if she simply endorsed her past statements point-blank.  What if she doesn’t quite believe them anymore?  What if the issue isn’t as important to her, or wouldn’t be a legislative priority for her if she became president?  Bachmann repeatedly responded to Gregory’s questions by reminding him that she is running for the presidency of the United States.  If she believes gay marriage should be dealt with by the states, then why would a President Bachmann staring down a $14 trillion deficit and a hostile Middle East worry about Neil Patrick Harris’s love life?

Liberals aren’t upset about a Bachmann presidency because they fear she would roll back gay rights or slow the national tide of increasing acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage.  As with Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle, the left are using a few nutty, outdated statements to stop a genuine reformer and charismatic populist, whose views on social issues are probably evolving like everyone else’s, from getting into office.  Liberals can’t stand the fact that Bachmann might effect real change on causes that are anathema to them, such as slashing unsustainable entitlement spending and stopping the worldwide spread of Sharia.



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Related articles

• Rep. Bachmann Clarifies Gay Marriage Opposition: I’m Not Running To Be Anyone’s Judge (mediaite.com)
• Could Anti-Gay Politics Sink A Presidential Campaign? (towleroad.com)
• Bachmann challenged on anti-gay comments (salon.com)
• Bachmann wins first poll of Republican contest for 2012 presidential candidate (guardian.co.uk)
• Gay conservative group requests meeting with Bachmann (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)

Discouraging military service, bean counting minority group members instead of evaluating achievement, injecting irrelevant sexual undertones—sound like conservative stances to me!

As Miss Manners once wrote on sexual orientation, the important distinction these days seems to be not gays vs. straights, but people who think other people’s sex lives are open for scrutiny vs. those who don’t.

A rapidly dwindling number of conservatives have been arguing that the military should preserve its ban on gays serving openly in the military.

The U.S.’s highest ranking military official, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, happens to disagree.  In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, he declared in no uncertain terms that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”  Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the nation’s other top defense official, testified alongside Mullen in support of repealing the ban.

Just before President Obama took office, 104 retired admirals and generals had signed a statement urging the next president to overturn the ban.

Apparently all of this wasn’t good enough for Senator John McCain, who had categorically stated in 2006, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.”  Last week McCain told Mullen and Gates that he still opposes lifting the ban.

I can understand some conservatives’ suspicion regarding overturning the ban on gays in the military, when the last president who tried to do so (Clinton) had nothing but contempt for the military and aggressively eroded its capabilities every year he was in office.

But those opposed to lifting the ban have offered a lame series of unrelated, “they doth protest too much”-sounding excuses more befitting liberals’ shifting defenses of their misguided and unconstitutional policies.

For example, there’s the argument that we shouldn’t “experiment” with the military while we’re in the middle of two wars.

I notice that we weren’t in the middle of any wars in 1993, when President Clinton first proposed lifting the ban.  If anything, we need more recruits now, due to the notoriously long and repeated tours of duty our soldiers have had to undergo in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need for specialized recruits such as Arabic translators.

The notion that our current roster of troops could do their jobs better if they weren’t distracted by the presence of the estimated 65,000 gay U.S. troops helping them out is ludicrous.  The more soldiers who are trained and willing to fight our wars, the better.  One of the best conservative arguments for the greatness of the U.S. is that we are able to get so many highly qualified people to volunteer for our military, and that so few leave due to conflict or dissatisfaction.

The necessity of maximizing troop strength during wartime is also reflected by the fact that the number of troops discharged for being gay decreased almost every year from 2001 to 2009, even though general military enlistment was up after the September 11 attacks.

For what it’s worth, we did experiment with this policy in recent history, and during a war at that: the ban on discharging gays was suspended during the Persian Gulf War, with no adverse consequences.

Then there’s the highly objective and verifiable suggestion that homosexuality is “incompatible” with military service.

This flimsy proposition is torn to smithereens by the inconvenient facts that gays: (1) currently serve honorably in the military, (2) have served honorably in the military since our country’s founding, and (3) already serve openly in the military in 30 major countries around the world, including nearly every NATO member and other U.S. allies such as Australia and Israel.  American soldiers serve alongside openly gay soldiers in these armies, and I haven’t heard about any mass defections on their part over fellow gay soldiers’ unprofessional conduct.

Conservatives generally reject affirmative action, correctly viewing the policy as amounting to reverse discrimination.  Why are so many conservatives hell-bent on discriminating against gays in the military?  It is true that some conservatives probably fear the day when gay rights groups start pushing for loosened standards for gays in the military to promote diversity or to right historical wrongs.  But just because the same thing happened with race and gender doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have granted equal rights to African Americans and women.

Violent felons, card-carrying Marxists, and radical Islamists may all happily serve in the U.S. army.  What sense does it make that, say, an Episcopalian Log Cabin Republican can’t?  Even a gay person who never utters a word about his sexual orientation in the military can be discharged for the act of getting married in one of the five states that allow it.

There’s also the contention that unit cohesion would be disrupted.  Yet the same claim was made regarding racial integration of the military in the 1950s.  This assertion slanders dedicated service members by purporting that (1) gay soldiers can’t do their jobs without making sexual advances toward their peers, and (2) heterosexual soldiers can’t do their jobs without dwelling on the possibility of advances from their peers.  Here I thought conservatives were the ones who held our military in such high esteem.

Admittedly, gays are asking for a tall order from the military: namely—nothing.  Nothing needs to be done to allow gays to serve openly, except for our Commander-in-Chief or Congress to declare that it be so.  Gays already serve.  Heterosexual service members claim they already know who many of their gay unit members are and don’t care.  If heterosexual soldiers can discern the most obvious cases and aren’t uncomfortable around these people, I think they can tolerate the existence of cases so undetectable they otherwise wouldn’t have guessed if they hadn’t found out.

All the military needs to do now is stop wasting time and resources sniffing out gays like contraband and axing them after having spent millions of dollars to train them.

Leftists are usually the ones infusing sexual undercurrents and lurid motives where none exist—pointing out latent homoeroticism in “Winnie the Pooh” or condemning “heteronormativity” in Jane Austen.  Why are some conservatives so intent on insisting that the seething, passionate impetus undergirding military service is… gay lust?

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