A person can not become President of the USA without publicly confessing belief in a supernatural being, or without pandering to those who hold such beliefs at every opportunity. I just want to say that to me this cynical playing to the tune of religious believers has these days developed its own dynamics, and it almost seems to have become a runaway process of politicians and candidates outcompeting each other to be perceived by the public as the most outragelously deluded bible-thumping fool around.
Rick Perry is one example of a cynically calculating politician who will pander to religious delusion in the general public, as can be seen with his support for the upcoming prayer rally in Houston , and Mitt Romney is another one, perfectly illustrated by this cartoon :
And then there is Michelle Bachmann. I’m not getting the impression that she is pandering a lot (apart from embarrassing nonsense like her recent Waterloo waterloo), no I think the lady with the fakest smile in the universe is a truly dangerous person, because she means it. Her homophobia and bigotry is strong and heartfelt, her capacity to think rationally appears weak, and you really would not want to be gay or anything other than an evangelical Christian under a President Bachmann.
Her husband runs a Christian counselling practice that receives state funding, and he is active in the so-called ex-gay movement. He has just been shown by an undercover journalist from Truth Wins Out to be practising “reparative therapy”, which means trying to cure gays from their affliction by prayer and “re-education” measures like practicing masculinity and looking at attractive women, all based on the flawed assumption that homosexuality is some kind of acquired illness that needs fixing. Of course it doesn’t work, and is potentially reinforcing self-loathing or depression and anxiety in people who are already struggling to come to terms with their homosexuality.
Bachmann has recently signed a pledge called “Marriage Vow“, brought up by some wacko Iowan religious guy who runs an organization called The Family Leader, in which she vowes to not only fight gay marriage and abortion, but also to ban all forms of pornography. I’m not sure the latter would go down well in the Mormon stronghold of Utah, the state with the highest number of online porn subscribers in the US. About this pledge :
“The Marriage Vow” begins on a racially charged note. “Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American president,” it says. It continues by denouncing the “anti-scientific bias” which treats “non-heterosexual inclinations” as innate and irreversible.
Whatever happens, this woman and her husband (and she has sworn submission to him, as a good god-fearing wife should, right !) must not win the next presidential election, or we are all in big trouble. I’ll take a cynic like Romney over the Bachmann menace any day.
