Theo’s Twit Of the Week: Marcus Bachmann

This week’s Twit wants to ride his submissive (but not subservient!) wife’s coat tails into the White House. Get ready to have your gay washed away by the healing power of Jesus and:

Marcus Bachmann

Marcus Bachmann

In a jab at First Lady Michelle Obama, Marcus Bachmann recently commented that, if he was to become the First Spouse (or Husband, or Gentleman – the ruling on proper nomenclature appears to still be out) he has “decided my cause is not going to be happy meals.”

So what will absorb Marcus’ time at the White House, aside from giving tours? “We are going to be the message-givers,” says Mr. Bachmann. What will be that message? “Marriage is between one man and one woman.”

While I do not back legislation to restrict eating choices in the United States, I can at least get behind Michelle Obama’s general gist of tackling the obesity problem that is currently plaguing the United States. 33.9% of U.S. adults are obese and another 34.4% are overweight (according to the CDC), so addressing this issue can be constructive. Overweight people can, with scientific facts in the hands, probably do something about their weight issues. So giving people more information about the food they eat is probably a good and potentially useful thing.

Mr. Bachmann’s crusade, however, is so useless and strange it boggles the mind.

I will never, ever understand the insane amount of attention the Christian evangelical community spends on gay people, who constitute about 3.5% of this country’s population. When they need to head to the Bible in order to back up their unusual obsession with homosexuality, I find it very strange that they need to go to sources that are not quotes from Jesus Christ or God the Father.

I know God the Father is a busy dude, so I suppose I can excuse him for forgetting to ban homosexuality in the Ten Commandments (and if anyone wants to bring up Leviticus 18, in which there is no statement that God explicitly authored said book, you better be willing to at least show me that anyone follows even half of those crazy rules), but Jesus is another matter. Evidently Jesus had time to relate the important (albeit erroneous) information that the mustard seed is the smallest seed in the world, but, on the all-important topic of homosexuality, he is queerly (ha!) silent. This part of God, which descended to earth in order to die for our sins and renew the covenant between man and his Creator, obviously did not consider (at least, according to the Holy Bible) it terribly important to address the satanic plague of homosexuality, so I often wonder why dolts like Marcus Bachmann and Ricky Santorum believe they know better than the Son of God they supposedly worship.

Of course this sort of Twittish behavior is not all that shocking, considering Marcus Bachmann’s day job. He owns and runs Bachmann & Associates, two Christian counseling clinics which apparently sponsor religious-based cures for homosexuality.

How is he qualified to dole out this and other treatments to the mentally-ill? Bachmann says he has received a “PhD” (for some reason he does not use the proper punctuation) in clinical psychology, but that is, at best, an extremely dubious claim. For one thing, anyone with a doctoral degree in psychology would be a Psy.D., not a Ph.D. Second, the University he attended did not offer a Psy.D degree during the time Bachmann attended the remote learning institution. He may have gotten a Ph.D. in either Interdisciplinary Studies or Arts and Sciences (depending on his actual graduation date, which he does not offer), so his doctoral degree would not be in psychology, though it might have been his focus in the degree program. Fourth, the “university” he attended is Union Graduate Institute, of which I cannot find anything, though he mostly likely means Union Graduate School, which became The Union Institute (folding in the post baccalaureate program) after emerging from bankruptcy in 1978. The school later come under scrutiny for the lack of difficulty in procuring doctoral degrees from the institution.

Well, maybe his masters work was done somewhere particularly prestigious? Sadly, no. Bachmann got his degree from Regent University, a fundamentalist mill founded by famous Southern Baptist firebrand Billy Graham.

Why hasn’t this shaky educational background been a problem for Mr. (pardon, I mean Dr.) Bachmann’s quest to heal the mentally-ill with Jesus? Evidently, in Minnesota, it is perfectly legal to practice mental health without a license – which is great, because Marcus does not have one. All three boards that certify professional mental health therapists in Minnesota have confirmed that Marcus Bachmann is not on their roles. Boy, he really wasted his time getting that “PhD”, didn’t he?

So in the end we have a man with a crappy by-mail doctorate who wishes to denounce homosexuality in a Constitutionally-binding way because he believes it is important to eliminate the possibility of gay couples changing their federal and state tax status, and his reason behind this is strictly based on his religious beliefs, despite the fact that the teachings of Jesus (who is, reputedly, part of the Holy Trinity at the heart of Christianity) and the Commandments God the Father say absolutely nothing on the matter?

Yeah, I know, Twit hardly covers it.

Thank God Michele Bachmann doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the nomination.