A la caza de Marcus Bachmann

(Aclaro: la foto no ha sido escogida con mala intención)

The Daily Beast:

If you aren’t yet familiar with the growing whispers about Michele Bachmann’s campaign —the uncorroborated speculation that the candidate’s profoundly antigay hubby, Marcus, is a closeted gay man— you will be. The chatter has already made its way from the blogs and Twitter (Cher tweeted that Marcus has tripped her exquisitely tuned gaydar) to the alternative press to The Daily Show, where Jon Stewart and Jerry Seinfeld left each other in stitches this week taking shots at Marcus Bachmann’s effeminate manner and “center-square gay” voice. (Anyone out there old enough to remember Paul Lynde?) As Stewart joked, the guy is “an Izod shirt away from being the gay character on Modern Family.” Clips of the comedians’ faux “comedy repression” session promptly popped up on the websites of such stodgy outlets as The Washington Post and The Atlantic.

The wringing of hands about whether it’s fair for the respectable media to promote this sort of salacious chatter is as inevitable as the chatter itself. But this particular assault on Marcus is about more than critics lobbing generic bombs at a fiercely conservative presidential combatant. Michele Bachmann has long been one of the most aggressive anti-gay-marriage crusaders in politics, while Marcus runs a Christian-based therapy clinic accused of dabbling in “reparative therapy,” a controversial counseling technique premised on the notion that you can "pray away the gay."

(...) But while Marcus’s sexuality holds little interest for me, I am interested to see how the Bachmann camp will handle the still-below-the-radar-but-getting-tough-to-ignore buzz. It’s one thing to be attacked during a campaign for your political positions or personal quirks. Most big-league candidates make their peace with the possibility that their beliefs, character, and personal lives will be publicly shredded before they opt to enter the game (or not, as in the case of Mitch Daniels).

But in Bachmann Land, where politics is so personal, what will be the reaction to the suggestion that Marcus is the very thing he has long devoted himself to fighting against? Slamming the congresswoman as a Jesus freak or an antigovernment extremist only fills her with pride. But how will she and her camp deal with her husband being lampooned as a closet case? It’s like Ronald Reagan being tarred as a down-low commie—or Grover Norquist being accused of harboring big-government impulses. (...)