Senator Michele Bachmann, Gays, and the Christian Gene

Senator Michele Bachmann is running for the Republican nomination to make a bid for the US presidency. Michele Bachmann and her husband's clinic(Bachmann & Associates) tries to "rehabilitate" gays into straightness. Brian Ross from ABC News reports:

A former patient who sought help from the Christian counseling clinic owned by GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann and her husband, Marcus, told ABC News he was advised that prayer could rid him of his homosexual urges and he could eventually be "re-oriented."

"[One counselor's] path for my therapy would be to read the Bible, pray to God that I would no longer be gay," said Andrew Ramirez, who was 17-years-old at the time he sought help from Bachmann & Associates in suburban Minneapolis in 2004. "And God would forgive me if I were straight."

Senator Michele Bachmann has personally stated:

It isn’t that some gay will get some rights. It’s that everyone else in our state will lose rights. For instance, parents will lose the right to protect and direct the upbringing of their children. Because our K-12 public school system, of which ninety per cent of all youth are in the public school system, they will be required to learn that homosexuality is normal, equal and perhaps you should try it. And that will occur immediately, that all schools will begin teaching homosexuality.” -- Senator Michele Bachmann, appearing as guest on radio program “Prophetic Views Behind The News”, hosted by Jan Markell, KKMS 980-AM, March 6, 2004.

The evidence shows that she wants a theocracy that does not tolerate lifestyle values that conflict with hers.

In honor of such people and their views I'm posting a humorous news parody. It pokes fun at fundamentalist Christians such as Senator Bachmann and her husband. I want to clarify that I'm aware that many Christians do not judge homosexuals and some even allow them as members of their congregations. On the topic of gays and Christianity I recommend the book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) by the historian John Boswell. To my surprise, this book revealed a lot of unexpected information on this subject. Enjoy the clip.

Alain Badiou, "Polemics"

(Verso, 2006)

Unsurprisingly, Canadian mainstream media is near unanimous in its reading of this weekend's G20 protests. The basic picture is that certain "anarchists" have created - you guessed it! - "anarchy" in Toronto, and are now in the process of being duly rounded up and punished. Democracy [sic] is saved! The Ottawa Sun, not fit to line an animal's cage, has even gone so far as to paint the clashes solely in terms of poor, defenceless riot cops harrassed by rocks, molotovs and bottles of urine. No mention of police wading into the supposedly safe "free speech zone", clubbing and pepper-spraying peaceful protesters.

To be clear: there has been violence on both sides. What I take issue with is that whereas property destruction by certain militant factions is almost universally denounced as "violence" or "terrorism" (including from the mouths of certain yellow labour representatives), actual violence against the bodies of those exercising their democratic rights has proven almost unthinkable as such. The headline of a local daily newspaper sums it up nicely: "Law and disorder". You can guess that the "law" has had no part in fomenting the disorder.

In the wake of the protests, the task ahead of the radical Left is legal defence, solidarity actions, community organization, and the dissemination of accurate information contra the mainstream media consensus. But additionally, some of us may also take solace in and gather strength from theory. I've had this argument too many times to repeat here, but I can personally attest to the bewildering and psychologically damaging effects of being at odds with and shut down by the armed wing of the dominant "democratic" situation. Theory is not exactly therapy, but it can be a means of getting one's bearings when this is desperately needed. It is of course not its own end. But in a situation of general police action, there is, I suggest, perhaps no better well at which to quench one's thirst than the writings of Alain Badiou.

Badiou's Polemics reminds us that representative "democratic" politics is not a cuddly affair. It is underpinned by violence and abject fear. His entire philosophical project is, in effect, an attempt to think the coming-to-be of that which is unthinkable within the representative-democratic situation - precisely, a properly communist politics from below - and to delineate an ethics of militancy which defines the human being in positive terms. Badiou promotes such virtues as courage, fidelity and endurance, leaving off with the dominant ethics of eternal guilt in face of the Other. I would suggest that a reading of Polemics will help those in North America to think their situation, despite the fact that there's much in the book that is slightly dated and mostly pertinent to French politics. One finds painstaking dissections of the Paris Commune and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a philosophical engagement with zionism and anti-semitism, and perhaps most importantly for the present, an attempt to think a radical subject-position relative to the dominant consensus.

Organize your communities; but read and think deeply, and as if your lives depended on it.