Andy Steiner wrote a well-balanced
profile of Michele Bachmann. She interviewed both those who supported Bachmann and those who opposed her. She interviewed both myself, and Ken Avidor for this article.
From the article:
In comic books, it’s easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. That may explain why Ken Avidor, a blogger, illustrator, transit activist, and comic-book artist from Minneapolis, figures he’s got Bachmann pegged.
“She’s bad news for Minnesota,” Avidor says. “Thanks to Michele Bachmann and all her crazy antics, we don’t have a Republican party that’s credible anymore. She says crazy stuff. Who do you believe? Who’s telling you the truth?”
Bachmann first caught Avidor’s attention and roused his anger when, as a state senator, she voted in favor of freeway expansions that he believed negatively impacted his south Minneapolis neighborhood. Later, news of Bachmann’s outspoken opposition to gay marriage and fundraising support for a controversial Annandale-based Christian punk-ministry group, You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, pushed Avidor over the edge. He began posting random, ranting messages detailing his frustration with Bachmann’s legislative moves on his personal blog.
Other Bachmann opponents took notice, and eventually Avidor was invited to contribute to Dump Bachmann, an online political blog dedicated to tracking the congresswoman’s every move. The website, founded in 2004 by Eva Young, a Minneapolis resident and political activist who describes herself as “more of an independent than a liberal,” chronicles Bachmann’s votes, quotes, appearances, and fundraising. Young sees the blog as a way to hold the congresswoman accountable for her actions. She views Dump Bachmann contributors as members of the Fifth Estate, keeping tabs on the public record of an elected official. And Young believes that record is one of intolerance and misinformation.
“I had another political blog,” Young explains. “I realized I was putting up a lot of posts that were about Bachmann. I was irritated that the mainstream media wasn’t covering how extreme she was. I wanted to get the truth out there, so I started a Bachmann-only site. It’s my goal to make everything that she does and says available online—so it doesn’t just go away.”
The record is important, but Young also has a larger mission that’s evident in her blog’s title: One way or another, she would like to see Bachmann leave public office.
These days, Avidor is Dump Bachmann’s biggest contributor. He posts something new—YouTube videos, audio from radio interviews, snippets from news articles or editorials—practically every day, sometimes even more than once a day. His hope is that Bachmann will eventually hang herself with her own words, somehow letting loose with a comment or action so outrageous that everyone except her most die-hard supporters will condemn her actions. He laughs: “I’m waiting for the Titanic to hit the iceberg.”
Steiner also interviewed Senator Scott Dibble (DFL, Minneapolis):
In 2002, Scott Dibble, an openly gay DFL state representative from southwest Minneapolis, was sworn in as a freshman member of the Minnesota Senate. Among his new colleagues in the upper chamber was Bachmann, elected in 2001. She could be quite charming, Dibble recalls: “When we were back in the retiring room, we were very friendly with one another. We’d chitchat about the weather and our families, the banal things people always chitchat about. It was very strange.”
But Bachmann was a vocal opponent of gay marriage, and in November 2003, she and a sponsor in the house, Representative Mary Liz Holberg, of Lakeville, proposed a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage in Minnesota. The issue consumed much of the legislative session. “I had to contend with that issue and all of the hysteria, distortion, and mean-spiritedness that boiled up around that,” says Dibble, who married his partner, Richard Leyva, in California before the passage of Proposition 8. “To say it was difficult to experience is putting it lightly. We [the DFL] were in an extremely narrow majority with only three votes to spare…. It was nonstop attack, attack, attack against gay folks.”
Some of the toughest attacks came from Bachmann, Dibble says. “It was deeply cutting and personal and painful to hear the kind of things that she and her supporters said about people like me and families like mine.”
Lawmakers twice voted down Bachmann and Holberg’s legislation, in 2004 and 2005. In 2006, Bachmann moved on to the U.S. House of Representatives, where she has yet to introduce any legislation related to gay marriage.
Dibble thinks he knows why. “By the time she left state politics, Michele was already becoming a marginal player in the state senate,” he says. “Polling data showed that the issue was a dog for Minnesota Republicans. They thought they had their new ‘abortion’ in [gay] marriage—something that could get a whole bunch of them elected. But polling has showed that it wasn’t true, and subsequent elections confirmed that. When you’ve got people like Laura Bush, Cindy McCain, and Dick Cheney coming out in favor of same-sex marriage, it’s obvious that ground is shifting—and Bachmann knows that.”
This is something we have frequently noted on Dump Bachmann. Steiner goes on to get a comment from Chuck Darrell from the anti-gay activist organization, the Minnesota Family Council:
But some of Bachmann’s staunchest supporters say Bachmann hasn’t wavered at all on the issue. Chuck Darrell, director of communications for the Minnesota Family Council, says that Bachmann remains committed to limiting legal marriage to one man and one woman. “People of conservative faith have something I like to call a ‘faith antenna,’” Darrell says. “We can tell if someone is just doing ‘God talk’ or if they are truly authentic. Michele is the real deal. She’s bedrock. Her vocal support for traditional marriage is the best example of how beyond a shadow of a doubt her biblical worldview informs her public actions. I am confident she will never step down on that, never.”
If she is so concerned about this issue, why isn't she introducing the Federal Marriage Amendment in the house of representatives? After all, a Federal Judge found California's proposition 8 unconstitutional under the federal constitution.
