Bachmann “Does Not Hesitate” to Sign Offensive Pledge

National Jewish Democratic Council

Presidential candidate Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) signed a highly offensive pledge advanced by the Iowa social conservative group The Family Leader. The pledge insensitively compares childrearing by single parents and same-sex couples to slavery, declares homosexuality a public health risk and compares it to polygamy, polyandry, and adultery, rejects a woman’s right to make decisions about her health, and continues the right wing’s incorrect straw-man argument against Islam. Nearly every point in the pledge conflicts with the values of most American Jews, who largely disagree with most of the points made by the pledge and oppose racist and homophobic rhetoric.

In particular, the pledge states:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

LBJ’s 1965 War on Poverty was triggered in part by the famous ‘Moynihan Report’ finding that the black out-of-wedlock rate had hit 26%; today, the white rate exceeds that, the overall rate is 41% and over 70% of African-American babies are born to single parents - a prime sociological indicator for poverty, pathology and prison regardless of race or ethnicity.

According to The Washington Post, a Bachmann aide said that she “did not hesitate to sign the pledge.” Other points in the pledge include:

• Vigorous opposition to any redefinition of the Institution of Marriage - faithful monogamy between one man and one woman - through statutory-, bureaucratic-, or court-imposed recognition of intimate unions which are bigamous, polygamous, polyandrous, same-sex, etc.
• Recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, greater financial stability, and that children raised by a mother and a father together experience better learning, less addiction, less legal trouble, and less extramarital pregnancy.
• Support for prompt reform of uneconomic, anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy, tax policy, and marital/divorce law, and extended ‘second chance’ or ‘cooling-off’ periods for those seeking a ‘quickie divorce.’
• Earnest, bona fide legal advocacy for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) at the federal and state levels.
• Steadfast embrace of a federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which protects the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman in all of the United States.
• Humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy - our next generation of American children - from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion and other types of coercion or stolen innocence.
• Support for the enactment of safeguards for all married and unmarried U.S. Military and National Guard personnel, especially our combat troops, from inappropriate same-gender or opposite-gender sexual harassment, adultery or intrusively intimate commingling among attracted (restrooms, showers, barracks, tents, etc.); plus prompt termination of military policymakers who would expose American wives and daughters to rape or sexual harassment, torture, enslavement or sexual leveraging by the enemy in forward combat roles.
• Rejection of Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control.
• Recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.
• Fierce defense of the First Amendment’s rights of Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech, especially against the intolerance of any who would undermine law-abiding American citizens and institutions of faith and conscience for their adherence to, and defense of, faithful heterosexual monogamy.

This pledge is just the latest indication that today’s Republican Party has been taken over by extremists. Bachmann’s prompt signing confirms what NJDC knew and said before: Bachmann is simply too extreme for the vast majority of American Jews.