“Ex-Gay” Controversy Rocks Michele Bachmann’s Presidential Campaign

Michele & Marcus Bachmann (Photo by Steve Pope/Getty Images North America)

Is the therapy clinic owned and operated by a prominent Republican presidential candidate and her husband practicing a highly controversial and discredited treatment to “cure” gay people of their “homosexual” behavior? It’s a rapidly growing story that has engulfed the campaign of a conservative congresswoman that has surged to the top of the race for the 2012 GOP nomination.

The facts indicate that Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and her husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann,  are indeed engaged in the controversial “reparative therapy” that uses counseling and extreme Christian teachings to supposedly turn gay people straight. It’s a story first reported by a gay rights activist organization, but now picked up my numerous mainstream media outlets and is forcing Rep. Bachmann to answer very tough questions regarding her family’s “business.”

The “business” run by the Bachmanns is called Bachmann & Associates. It is a Christian therapy center in Minnesota that, according to its website,  provides ” quality Christian counseling in a sensitive, loving environment.” It’s specialties include marriage and family counseling, or care for those feeling “overwhelmed.” The center has also received over $150,000 in state and federal funding.

“Truth Wins Out,” a gay rights group with an extensive focus on the “ex-gay” therapy at the center of the Bachmann scandal, first broke the story with an undercover report alleging that the treatment at “Bachmann & Associates” went far beyond simple counseling in a “loving environment.” The report filed by the activist posing as a patient at the Bachmann clinic details the therapy he received based on the core values of he “ex-gay” movement, including the advice that “we’re all heterosexuals” and a book written by a friend of the Bachmanns that claims to be an “ex-lesbian.”

Rumors about the nature of Dr. Marcus Bachmann’s “therapy” preached at his Minnesota clinic had been swirling for years, made more prominent by the public rhetoric against gay rights and gay people used often by Rep. Bachmann in media appearances, in Congress, and now on the presidential campaign trail.  But the undercover report led to even more revelations about “Bachmann & Associates.”

Another report then appeared in The Nation magazine, where a former patient at the Minnesota clinic came forward with details of the counseling that he received, including being told he was “wrong” and “an abomination” for being a gay person.

“Being gay was not an acceptable lifestyle in God’s eyes…,” is what Andrew Ramirez was told.

In the summer of 2004, Andrew Ramirez, who was just about to enter his senior year of high school, worked up the nerve to tell his family he was gay. His mother took the news in stride, but his stepfather, a conservative Christian, was outraged. “He said it was wrong, an abomination, that it was something he would not tolerate in his house,” Ramirez recalls. A few weeks later, his parents marched him into the office of Bachmann & Associates, a Christian counseling center in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, which is owned by Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus. From the outset, Ramirez says, his therapist—one of roughly twenty employed at the Lake Elmo clinic—made it clear that renouncing his sexual orientation was the only moral choice. “He basically said being gay was not an acceptable lifestyle in God’s eyes,” Ramirez recalls. According to Ramirez, his therapist then set about trying to “cure” him. Among other things, he urged Ramirez to pray and read the Bible, particularly verses that cast homosexuality as an abomination, and referred him to a local church for people who had given up the “gay lifestyle.” He even offered to set Ramirez up with an ex-lesbian mentor.

Ramirez was not impressed. After his second appointment, he resolved not to go back, despite the turmoil it might cause in his family. “I didn’t feel it was something that I wanted to change, and I didn’t think it could be changed,” he says. “I was OK with who I was.”

Such “treatment,” known as “ex-gay” counseling or “reparative therapy,”  is not embraced by the mainstream psychological comunity and is actually deemed a risky and potentially fatal treatment, with suicide and depression being potential reactions, as The Nation reported in its piece.

Most professional psychologists view reparative therapy skeptically, to say the least. In 2007 the American Psychological Association assembled a task force to study the effectiveness of this approach. After spending two years sifting through the available research—it evaluated eighty-three studies dating back to 1960—the group concluded that there was scant evidence that sexual orientation could be changed. What’s more, it found that attempting to do so could cause depression and suicidal tendencies among patients. Based on these findings, in 2009 the APA voted to repudiate reparative therapy by a margin of 125 to 4.

Faced with increased scrutiny over the nature of the “family business,” the Bachmanns, the Bachmann campaign and the Minnesota center have all either refused comment or insisted nothing is wrong with the activities of Bachmann & Associates.

ABC News investigated the allegations, found similar concerns over reparative therapy being practiced as was discovered by the previous reports, and could not get anyone at the center or in the Bachmann campaign to respond.

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.”

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The disclosures have provided fresh insight into what Michele Bachmann has called her family business — the primary source of income for her family as she left her law practice to move into politics. The counseling center has factored into Bachmann’s campaign narrative, as well — evidence, she said, of her ability to understand what it takes to create jobs and run a small business.

“We’re very proud of our business and all job creators in the U.S.,” Michele Bachmann told a reporter when asked about the clinic Monday.

The Bachmann & Associates counseling centers appear to offer a wide range of services to people in emotional distress and are clearly billed on the clinic’s website as a religious-based approach to mental health treatment. ABC News sought to interview Marcus Bachmann and his wife about the clinic and its practices, but a campaign spokeswoman declined to make them available. The campaign did not respond to written questions, instead sending a statement that says they cannot answer questions about specific treatments provided to patients.

“Those matters are protected by patient-client confidentiality,” the statement says. “The Bachmann’s are in no position ethically, legally, or morally to discuss specific courses of treatment concerning the clinic’s patients.”

Although this level of scrutiny over potential “ex-gay” therapy being conducted at the Bachmann clinic may be new, controversial statements and actions providing ample evidence of the Bachmanns’ hostility to gay rights and gay Americans is not.

Dr. Marcus Bachmann told a Christian radio program last year that gays are “barbarians” with a “sinful nature” that “need to be educated” and “need to be disciplined.”

As a presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann has recently signed a pledge from “Family Leader,” a Christian conservative group, that calls for the government to ban pornography and gay marriage. It also specifically calls “homosexuality” a “choice,” fitting in with the “ex-gay” ideology practiced at the Bachmanns’ clinics.

Congresswoman Bachmann also ahas a long history of controversial statements regarding gay rights and gay marriage. The Washington Post reported that Bachmann once accused a lesbian woman of trying to “keep her” in a bathroom stall “against her will” and that Bachmann once called  gay marriage ““probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, 30 years.”

Michele Bachmann has called gay marriage “probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, 30 years.” In 2005, she ran screaming from a bathroom at a constituent forum, claiming that a lesbian had attempted to keep her there against her will. (The woman said she was merely questioning Bachmann about her position on gay marriage.) As a state senator, she was seen crouching behind hedges to observe a gay rights rally. (She has explained that she was checking the turnout.) Dr. Bachmann’s views on homosexuality have likewise earned him the ire of gay activists and liberal critics.

Based at least partly on her anti-gay rhetoric and strong “values” record, Rep. Bachmann is now leading the GOP polls in Iowa, the important state with the first caucus of the presidential primary season and the traditional bellwether for presidential campaigns.