Is Marcus Bachmann to Michele as Bill was to Hillary ’08?
An article in this morning’s Washington Post on Marcus Bachmann highlights the octopus-like, unguided missile role he’s playing in his wife’s run for the presidency. He sounds almost as helpful to his wife’s campaign as Bill was to Hillary’s in ’08. One can always criticize the source (The WaPo) but it’s hard to contest actual on-the-record quotations. Marcus sounds more like poison than catnip to many otherwise pro-Bachmann voters who could tip the 2012 election. Two points in the Post piece could prove particularly troublesome:
(1)”In an interview last year with a Christian-radio talk show, Marcus Bachmann, a therapist who runs a faith-infused counseling center here, compared homosexuals to ‘barbarians’ who ‘need to be educated, need to be disciplined.’”
(2)“ ‘He is her godly husband,’ said Peter Bachmann, Dr. [Marcus] Bachmann’s oldest brother…” ‘The husband is to be the head of the wife, according to God.’ It is a philosophy that Michele Bachmann echoed to congregants of the the Living Word Christian Center in 2006, when she stated that she pursued her degree in tax law only because her husband had told her to. ‘The Lord says: Be submissive, wives. You are to be submissive to your husbands,’ she said.”
This attitude undoubtedly cuts down on marital disputes, but how will it play in Yourtown, USA?
I’m no fan of Bachmann, but the WaPo (and the lefty blogs that originally posted this story a week ago) is being dishonest. Bachmann’s husband was comparing children to barbarians. Hence the disciplined and educated doesn’t mean what they are saying.
Leftist’s Palinization of Bachmann.
Palinization. Going after the family.
Some of it is people’s lack of understanding of Christian beliefs. Man is head of the household. (Makes him have to man up… a good thing.) Man submits to God. Woman submits to man. Man also submits to woman. Each yields to one another in different things. A man who cannot submit to God also cannot submit to anyone else.
Going after these religious statements is really over the top. Unless you are heavily involved in the particular faith, everything will be taken out of context.
The exception to that is Islam, of course, since it is not strictly religious, but also is aggressively secular. “Spread Islam throughout the world by the sword.” – Surah 9:5
Bachmann’s relationship with her husband, and their desire to follow Biblical precepts, is of absolutely no concern to anyone but them. I predict that most pro-Bachmann voters will have no problem with her private life.
I’d like to say to the four commenters to this post that I, personally, was not voicing criticism of Rep. Bachmann for her views or her marriage or even her husband’s views. The point of my post was to say (what I actually did say) that “Marcus sounds more like poison than catnip to many otherwise pro-Bachmann voters who could tip the 2012 election.”
My intention was certainly not to “Palinize” Bachmann or to say that voters should or should not vote for her because of her husband and/or because of her attitude toward him. I raised the question of whether
Marcus Bachmann, and Michele Bachmann’s submissive attitude toward him, might have negative consequences in the general election, when Independents (many former Democrats) will be among the voters—which they won’t be in Republican primaries. I was trying to point to a potential general-election problem, not—as some commenters seemed to believe—to voice my personal feelings about either of them or their marriage. I expressed no personal feelings about their marriage, and do not do so now.