5 kids make a convincing argument that he's bi at the minimum.

I'm giggling at the idea of Marcus Bachmann adding "No homo!" in his swishy little way to the end of every public statement he makes over the next year or two.

@1, I think you underestimate the power of willful self-delusion. For one thing, I'd wait on a paternity test before I acknowledge that those kids are all Marcus'; for another, if he really believes he shouldn't be gay, he can probably grit his teeth, think of a shirtless, muscular Jesus, and perform his Biblical duties from time to time. Self-righteousness can be a turn-on sometimes; witness the whole "hatefuck" phenomenon.

I beg to differ. I think he's a very real witless. Gah.

I had sex with women. It's amazing what you can do when you close your eyes and think, "It's Keanu Reeves, it's Keanu Reeves, it's Keanu Reeves," over and over again.

@4- Whoa.

Also, seriously making fun of his lisp just isn't that funny. It gets less funny every time it happens. Stop the joke before you kill it completely.

@4 -- he's not very blonde! :) But he is cute.

@1, my paternal grandfather was gay. Not bi, gay. He managed a 35 year marriage and 4 kids while still being gay. My mom made the same argument as you, positing that the existence of children proved bisexuality. My father's response? "No. He was gay." Grandpa lived in a sham marriage for the sake of public appearances, his career, and to be a father. Luckily these days gay men need not marry women to become fathers. Unfortunately some still do.

Please KEEP making fun of his lisp. The whole point, for you lot who are so willfully ignorant, is that this man has devoted his life to attacking gay people. The possibility that he is a big, swishy queen -- and that his wife has probably been driven insane by his murky sexuality enough to put forth constitutional amendments that might scare the hetero back into him -- is so epic, so glorious, so operatic that I just can't stand it.

Cheat on your wife? Open season by the media bloodhounds. Closet case who hates gays? Back off!

Yeah right, fuck that. Let the mockery continue!

With his lisp, sense of fashion, and dancing skills, I actually find myself wanting to like him. Here's hoping he lets himself out of the closet someday and sees the light.

Personally, I think it would be kind of awesome to have a flaming closet queen as First Lady.

"Personally, I think it would be kind of awesome to have a flaming closet queen as First Lady."

Heh. You know, they say only Nixon could have gone to China...

"Among devout evangelicals, ferocious attacks—including people bearing false witness against you—are brandished as a badge of honor."

Soon enough, "acting gay" is going to be the next cool thing among the Young Republicans, just because!

Everybody wins!

@14: "oh look our Danny has a new obsession"

And you're one to talk! Every thread. Eeeeeevery thread you have to talk to Dan. Do you stalk him in person, or just lust from afar?

Right thinking patriots and traditionalists will see through this effort to discredit the Bachmann's and set the marxist homosexual movement back to where it belongs...

....in the back of a limo with Larry Sinclair and Barack Hussein Obama.

ROTFLMAO!!!

I <3 you, Lord Basil. You're like Landover Baptist, but in person form. Or internet person form, anyway.

it may not convince gay men, but 5 kids will certainly convince evangelicals with a persecution complex.

are you all arguing that there's no such thing as bi if same-sex desire is repressed? he could be 5 minutes from gay, he could be bi, he could be gay. i think he's the only one that knows, and he probably won't let himself think honest thoughts about it, regardless.

and to suggest that a woman that converted to evangelical christianity at 16 had children by another man is just unrealistic. they believe their own bullshit.

I think it won't help, and it reeks of "Now _I_get to be the one mocking, and in a righteous cause no less."

The worst thing bullies usually do is to put their disease in you.

@9: Bachmann does have a certain goofy, queeny charm, at least when he's not being a hateful creep.

Please, people, stop hoping that he comes out, or at least let those of us who have been subjected to conversion therapy against our will decide if he gets to be in the club or not. It is all I can do to be willing to evaluate a minute and detailed apology in three volumes, although even then I still cannot imagine anything he might say to redeem himself and make himself worthy of admittance, and if then the rest of you welcome him into the club with open arms I might just have to create a new sexual orientation to adopt.

The thought that someone so hatefully repulsive might share any of the thoughts or emotions that give my life its greatest beauties makes me want to vomit for a month. The thought of his Kinsey score being anything higher than .006 gives me cramps. Please stop making it worse.

@5

Icee wat u did thar.

Why do people continue to blame Dan for having a double standard here? A double standard requires something like treating comparably similar people in comparably similar ways. Nothing remotely like that is happening here!

Would it help to step away from the gay issue for a moment? Imagine 10th grade, where Bachmann is a gorgeous, privileged, popular homecoming king who spends most of his time harassing and persecuting the nerdy, rejected kids in the Chess club. And then, one glorious day, the nerds discover Mr. Bully playing chess! One of them says, OMG, Bachmann, I can't believe you are Such a Nerd!!! A significant portion of commenters here would apparently fault the nerdy chess club kid for being a bullying hypocrite. Puzzling.

"And, for what it's worth, I find the fact that an anti-gay bigot like Marcus Bachmann finds himself in the position of having to prove a negative—that this big queen isn't gay—completely and utterly delightful. Religious bigots like Bachmann and his odious beard have been putting gay people in that position—we're not pedophiles, we're not trying to destroy the family, it's not a choice, we don't eat feces—for decades now. Payback's a bitch, ain't it?"

Quite so. Very well said, Mr Savage.

@22: I also think that it's because you're British that you see the word "fag" as an insult. Fag is much more neutral than it used to be- certainly, people still use it as an insult, but I don't think it's a whole lot more insulting than "gay" or "homo" when said in a hateful tone of voice either.

Also, I don't think it counts as bullying when it's so obviously true. Aaron Burr famously lost his libel suit to John Cheetham because the court ruled that it wasn't libel if the offending language is true. I think in a few years, Marcus Bachmann might be caught lifting luggage...

@21: How/when were you subjected to conversion therapy against your will? That's horrible. I didn't realize that happened... I figured the people there were at least there voluntarily.

@12: Hmm? Why Nixon?

@28: I imagine he was a kid and his parents forced him to go.

Man, I have no issue with either targeting Marcus Bachmann for his odious, homophobic activities or with pointing out the irony/appropriateness that his manner is stereotypically effeminate. I just wish you'd stop employing homophobic slurs for this purpose. It seems uncouth.

If it isn't okay to assume that teenagers are gay because they don't fit ideals of masculinity or femininity then it shouldn't be all right to do so of Mr. Bachman either. We should give him a hard time because of his cruel and deceptive "cure" for homosexuality and for his support o his wife's pigheaded views; there's plenty of hypocrisy to mock without becoming hypocrites ourselves.

33, no, I don't see how that works. Stalking? No, none of it. And "someone" with a lisp? No: one of The Very Bullies Themselves, strangely exhibiting the same behavior for which he persecutes people. See how THAT works?

@27 what are you talking about? In Britain, a fag is a cigarette. It's an offensive word on *this* side of the pond. And for all the efforts to reclaim it here -- including Dan's own -- it's still very offensive, especially depending on where you are.

I think if Bachmann were having to defend himself from being a bigot, THAT would be payback. As it is, how is this any different from years before when someone was in the closet and vociferously denying they were gay? The one thing that's different is that he is lying when he says he doesn't do conversion therapy. That says a lot more about gay progress, that trying to turn gay people straight is considered unpopular.

He probably is gay. Let's make fun of him for being in the closet, for being a hypocrite. Not for his lisp and walk.

Marcus is only as gay as he looks and acts.

...

And you look Mahvelous, Dahlink!

Update on my @36 -- my bad. "Fag/got" can be used the same way in Britain as in here, with the exception that it's fine to use the word for cigarettes, which we don't do here. Guess my brit cohorts were good about just doing that :-P

Even so, I still dispute that it's less offensive over here. There may be regional variation, but I'd be cautious about claiming "faggot" isn't a big deal in this country.

@36: " And for all the efforts to reclaim it here -- including Dan's own -- it's still very offensive, especially depending on where you are."

Yeah, that totally didn't work with "queer".

Oh wai

@28/29 - Correct; I was forced into it as a teen. It was not pleasant, but I did at least emerge victorious over the vile "therapist" and I usually say that's all that counts.

If there are any people on the face of the earth who, if I could decree it, just don't get to be gay no matter what, it would be conversion therapists. No matter how miserable Mr B is made by being "claimed" or "embraced" by people whose company he would dread, for me it's just not worth it.

It's too bad that those of us who were hurt directly by people like him have to be trampled upon again by our purported supporters in their eagerness to smear his kind.

@18:
"they believe their own bullshit."

You're right. They don't practice it, but they believe it.

Presumably the Democrats would be most happy with the Tea Party if it was popular enough to take over the Republican Party, but not popular enough to then win the Presidency. And it seems like it might be exactly that popular.

@39: I'm thinking maybe regional variation is the thing here- I live in Oakland, and everyone kind of uses "fag", "bitch", "girlfriend" and "darling" as interchangeable terms. Actually, that might be an age thing too because I don't think that's true of people my mother's generation, but it's definitely true of people my age (20).

@44: I'd be most happy with them if they dropped the religious and social conservative shtick and stuck with the original financial responsibility and limited government stuff. For a second, when the Tea Party started, I thought we would actually have sane Republicans again.

@BEG: Context is EVERYTHING. Fag/got still REALLY bothers some people (in my experience, this is less true for people who have not themselves been the victims of extensive homophobic bullying), it's claimed as an identity by some people in an "it's our word" sort of way, it's claimed as a positive universally-usable identity by some people, and some people couldn't give less of a fuck. We give words power: if I don't speak Spanish and someone calls me "maricón", I'm not likely to take offense. That person might be TRYING to use words as violence against me or to shame me, but my lack of understanding precludes me from imbuing the word with power, and so it completely fails at its aim. I'm not suggesting that people need to "just get over" 'hate speech', as I recognize that it can be difficult to disassociate particular words from the contexts of violence (physical, economic, social, emotional, etc.) in which we've most often heard them, and that it's easier to do so the more privileged classes of which one is part, but to claim that words, even words functioning in a given social context, have any sort of intrinsic meaning or power without that power being enacted with the complicity or even agency of the listener (consider all of the instances of projection, where someone will miss-hear a word, or interpret it in a radically different fashion than was meant - don't ever refer to anything as "niggardly" ever, and don't call anything "tribal" unless everyone in earshot has an explicit understanding that you're using the term to mean "characterized by heavy in-group affinity or bias" and not as a slur against persons of color - as one that offends hir and take extreme offense).

In certain groups/social geographies/subcultures, "fag" has been entirely disempowered; I would argue that an outsider coming into such a discourse who takes offense is actually at fault for not understanding the normal use/connotations of the word in that social context (ethnocentricity - MY understanding of something is universal, and I need make no effort to understand how a cultural symbol functions in the context in which it's used). "Please don't call me a faggot, as it offends me," is a perfectly legitimate sentiment; "Ever using the word faggot is wrong," or even, "Straight people should never use the word faggot," are absurd forms of cultural policing, presuming a right for a particular group (and in this case a tiny minority) to define cultural symbols. The words are never the issue - the problem is always the cultural meaning attached to the words. I've never found the the words "gay" or "fag" or "homo" or "queer", when thrown at me with venom, to be particularly insulting or hurtful, as 1) I don't think and never have thought there's anything wrong with being gay, and 2) I've never given all that much of a fuck about what bigots, or, really, most people, think of me. It's really almost impossible to verbally bully someone with unassailable self-esteem.