Presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann has emerged as a legitimate contender in the 2012 election by winning the straw poll in Iowa. As a fiscal conservative, President Bachmann will attempt to repeal President Obama’s health care reform, make massive cuts in government spending and simultaneously fight for her religious ideals, namely “protecting” the institution of marriage.
Unfortunately, defending the institution of marriage is just a shallow euphemism for denying the basic human right to wed two homosexual people solely because they are homosexual. This is ironic, of course, because a true constitutionalist would realize that the Founding Fathers intended a secular government that did not pass laws rooted in a particular religion’s agenda, no matter how prevalent that religion may be.
More ironic still is that, for as much as she rails against government spending and wants to cut back on Medicaid, her clinic ,Bachmann and Associates in Minneapolis, has received about $137,000 in Medicaid funds just since 2005, according to the Minnesota Department of Human Services. This is the same clinic that has been accused of using such tactics as, “pray away the gay,” therapy, a practice aimed at, “curing,” homosexuals through prayer.
Bachmann has stayed true to her conservative ideals throughout the debt ceiling crisis, doing her best to make Obama out to be an uncontrollable liberal on a rampant spending craze. Hypocritical as usual, because Republican icon Ronald Reagan raised the debt ceiling 17 times during his own Presidency, according to Newsweek. She has voiced her approval of the Tea Party, the radically conservative group that seemed to have no trouble gambling away the nation’s credit rating just to see some spending cuts.
Furthermore, Bachmann voted against withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, a war which costs in excess of $100 billion a year and has expressed support for the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, one of the most expensive pieces of legislation in American history. It does seem that reducing the deficit is the first thing on her mind, unless of course our military, by far the largest in the world, or the wealthy would suffer even a cent of revenue reduction.
Probably needless to say at this point, she has referred to global warming as a hoax, she mentioned in the recent debate that she hopes to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, and on evolution, she said in a 2006 debate that, “There is a controversy among scientists about whether evolution is a fact…” A recent project by the National Center for Science Education found that there are more scientists and researchers named Steve than there are scientists and researchers that disbelieve in evolution.
Michele Bachmann wishes to lead the particularly vacuous and unapologetically radical Tea Party group into the forefront of the global exchange of ideas with her campaign for the American presidency. Representative Bachmann can keep her tea; I prefer progress.