[There was a video here] 
 
 What is Michele Bachmann running for, again? "I'm running for the presidency of the United States," the Iowa straw poll winner helpfully clarified to Meet the Press host David Gregory on Sunday morning. "I'm not running to be anyone's judge." Except for, apparently, gay couples with kids, whom the congresswoman refused to describe as "families." But stop asking Michele Bachmann about that! This isn't "what people are concerned about right now"! Even though it is, according to Michele Bachmann, "the defining political issue of our time." ||||| 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. 
 
 Media Click for More ] Click to View] Why Won't Michele Bachmann Talk About Her Taxpayer-Funded Anti-Gay Therapy Clinics? About the Author Mariah Blake Mariah Blake is a writer based in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, the New Republic, Foreign... Related Topics Entertainment 
 
 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.” 
 
 As Republican presidential contender Michele Bachmann has surged in the polls, the spotlight has turned on her husband and main political adviser, Marcus Bachmann, who has a PhD in clinical psychology and owns two Christian counseling centers in Minnesota. There has been a great deal of speculation that his clinics, which have received $161,000 in state and federal funding, try to cure homosexuality—and the chatter has only grown louder since his comments likening gays to “barbarians” who “need to be educated” and “disciplined” surfaced in the blogosphere last week. Marcus Bachmann has denied these allegations. “That’s a false statement,” he replied when the Minneapolis City Pages asked if his clinic tried to cure gays. And until now there was no firm evidence to back these allegations up. But information obtained by The Nation suggests that Bachmann & Associates therapists do, in fact, try to change sexual orientation. It also sheds new light on the Bachmanns’ embrace of the controversial ex-gay movement and related psychological approaches, which portray homosexuality as a disease to be rooted out. 
 
 Some of the most potent material was provided by Truth Wins Out, a gay rights group that opposes the ex-gay movement. In late June, a Truth Wins Out activist named John Becker donned two hidden cameras—one embedded in a wristwatch—and attended five treatment sessions at Bachmann’s Lake Elmo clinic. Becker, who is openly gay, presented himself as a committed Christian who was struggling with homosexuality. The video he collected seems to confirm Ramirez’s allegations that staff members at Bachmann & Associates try to change sexual orientation. Becker’s therapist (another of Marcus Bachmann’s employees) repeatedly assured him that homosexuality could be overcome. “At the core value…in terms of how God created us, we’re all heterosexual,” he explained, according to the footage. “God has created you for heterosexuality.” The therapist also mined Becker’s personal history for traumatic experiences that might have turned him gay. To curb Becker’s gay impulses, the therapist urged him to pray and read Scripture and suggested Becker “develop” his masculinity. He also encouraged him to find a “heterosexual guy” to act as an AA-type sponsor. Later, he referred Becker to Outpost Ministries, a church that helps “the sexually and relationally broken”—in other words, homosexuals—“find healing and restoration through relationship with Jesus Christ.” 
 
 At moments in the videos, Becker seemed to try to bait the therapist into saying something controversial. For instance, Becker brought up a conversation in which his brother told him that gay people could just as easily go to heaven as anyone else and pressed the therapist to say this wasn’t so: “I mean, he was wrong, right, with what he said? He was wrong, wasn’t he?” The therapist tried to dodge the question. In later sessions, Becker spoke excitedly about ex-gay literature he’d found, which raises the question: to what degree was the therapist simply following his lead? 
 
 Both Bachmann & Associates and the Bachmann campaign declined to comment for this story, though in the past Marcus Bachmann has insisted his clinics don’t push people to change their sexual orientation. “If someone comes in a homosexual and they want to stay a homosexual, I don’t have a problem with that,” he told the Minneapolis City Pages. Nevertheless, the techniques the therapist at his Lake Elmo clinic used were typical of so-called reparative therapies, which cast homosexuality as a mental disorder and see conversion to heterosexuality as the only healthy outcome. “The explicit goal of the sessions was transforming Becker from homosexual to heterosexual,” says Wayne Besen, Truth Wins Out’s executive director. 
 
 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. 
 
 Despite these facts, the approach continues to be embraced by conservative culture warriors and the ex-gay movement—and the Bachmanns fall squarely in this camp. Michele Bachmann has made no secret of her disdain for homosexuality. She has likened teaching about it in schools to “child abuse” and dubbed homosexuality itself a “sexual dysfunction.” She has also said gay marriage is “probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, thirty years.” 
 
 Less well known is the Bachmanns’ fondness for ex-gay ideology. One sign of this is the close bond they have cultivated with Janet Boynes, an African-American woman who claims that she was driven to drugs and lesbianism by the abuse she suffered as a child—among other things, she was raped by an altar boy. She says she broke free of the “lesbian lifestyle” after an encounter with a Christian woman in a grocery store parking lot set her on the path to salvation. Boynes has since come out strongly against gay rights. For instance, she was featured in a national ad campaign against hate crimes protection for gays and has argued that “it is a mockery to everything blacks suffered and the rights we won to claim that homosexuality is a civil rights issue.” 
 
 Both Boynes and the Bachmanns declined to comment on their relationship. (“They are friends. I love them dearly. But I will not talk about the Bachmanns,” Boynes said when contacted by phone for this article. “This interview is over.”) But the Bachmanns have leaned on Boynes to promote their antigay message. In 2005, Marcus Bachmann gave a presentation called “The Truth About the Homosexual Agenda” at the Minnesota Pastors’ Summit, a gathering of conservative religious leaders designed to build support for anti–gay marriage legislation. According to Curt Prins, a Minneapolis marketing consultant who was in attendance, Bachmann first offered his professional assessment that same-sex attraction was an affliction that could be rooted out. Then, as confirmation, he called Boynes to the stage to tell her story and show off before-and-after photos—a dour masculine-looking woman with cropped hair, followed by a smiling paragon of femininity. Prins, who is gay, says the crowd went wild. “They thought this was the word of God,” he recalls. 
 
 Boynes has also made a number of public appearances alongside Michele Bachmann. And the website for Boynes’s ministry, which aims to help people overcome homosexuality, features a glowing endorsement from the Minnesota Congresswoman. According to photos Becker took, Boynes’s book, Called Out: A Former Lesbian’s Discovery of Freedom, is displayed in the lobby of Bachmann & Associates’ Lake Elmo clinic, along with a note from Marcus Bachmann, saying, “Janet is a friend. I recommend this book as she speaks to the heart of the matter and gives practical insights of truth to set people free.” 
 
 What does it mean to be set free? In April, Boynes, who has become a prominent ex-gay spokeswoman, was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Network, along with a former drag-queen stripper named Christian, whom she supposedly helped draw out of the “gay lifestyle.” At one point, host Lisa Ling asked Christian if he still struggled with attraction to men. He said he did, painfully: “I describe it as bleeding out of my eyeballs.” 
 
 Ramirez, the former Bachmann & Associates patient, who is now working for a hardwood lumber company, says it was stories like these that prompted him to come forward. Since dropping out of therapy, he has come to terms with his sexuality and delved more deeply into his Christian faith. He wants other young gay people to know they can do the same. “I want to send a clear message,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with you. One day you will find love and acceptance.” ||||| Michelle Bachmann on the Campaign trail (Chris Buck for Newsweek) 
 
 Barreling past Iowa’s iconic cornfields aboard a blue campaign bus, Michele Bachmann tries to explain the uncanny political force that has catapulted her from a backbencher in Washington to a leading contender on the presidential trail. She has just finished electrifying a crowd in Ft. Dodge, Iowa, with a folksy assault on a bloated federal government that she and her Tea Party compatriots routinely vow to dismantle. “Obamacare” will be repealed in a Bachmann administration, the Republican congresswoman from Minnesota vows. G-men won’t tell you what lightbulbs you can use, either. And more of your hard-earned money will end up in your pocketbooks, not on the ledgers of mindless bureaucrats. 
 
 Such refrains have become all too familiar in Bachmann’s other world back in Congress, thanks to the yearlong rise of the Tea Party that just brought Washington to a standstill and the nation to the brink of default. But in Iowa, Bachmann’s simple, black-and-white distillations of complex problems are cheered as refreshing and tough. It’s part of the reason she finds herself favored to finish near the top of the Ames Straw Poll on Aug. 13, the first political-strength test of the arduous 2012 presidential contest. 
 
 Petite and prim, the 55-year-old mother of five delivers her stump speech with the earnestness of a preacher. She pulls out a huge whiteboard and for dramatic effect scrawls just how many zeros can be found in a trillion. 
 
 The elderly, the unemployed, the exasperated, and even a few disillusioned Democrats crowd her rallies and cheer her not-going-to-take-it-anymore shtick, even as they recognize some of its inherent contradictions. 
 
 “You use the word ‘anger.’ It’s not anger,” Bachmann told NEWSWEEK. Americans aren’t expressing “unhinged anger,” she says. “People are saying the country is not working.” 
 
 Married in 1979, Bachmann raised five children in Stillwater, Minn., and eventually fostered 23 kids. She has said her husband directed her to study tax law, and she obliged because “the Lord says: be submissive, wives; you are to be submissive to your husbands.” Asked about her choice of words, she explains, “That means that I respect my husband, and he respects me.” But in a Bachmann White House, she adds, “I would be the decision maker.” 
 
 Just months ago, Bachmann was the butt of jokes on late-night TV for her flawed grasp of U.S. history. But all that changed one night this spring when she took the stage at the first major GOP presidential debate with the middle-aged, drab men running for the nomination, and set herself apart with poise and precision. When others meandered or waffled, she shot back with answers that reduced Washington’s dysfunctional gridlock to understandable soundbites. 
 
 In Iowa, where she was raised, Bachmann has become the living embodiment of the Tea Party. She and her allies have been called a maniacal gang of knife-wielding ideologues. That’s hyperbole, of course. But the principled rigidity of her position has created some challenges for her campaign. 
 
 One is overcoming the perception of hypocrisy. Democrats—and some of Bachmann’s Republican opponents—have noted the gulf between her rhetoric and record. She earned a federal salary as a lawyer for the IRS (an agency despised by the Tea Party), for example. Pressed on whether she took Americans to court to force them to pay back taxes, she answers carefully. “Our employer was the United States Department of Treasury. That’s who paid my salary,” she says. “And the client that we represented was the IRS.” She also says that the job opened her eyes to the “huge bureaucracy and how devastating high taxes are on almost every sector of the economy…farmers and families and small businesses and individuals.” 
 
 Bachmann owned a stake in her father-in-law’s farm that received more than $250,000 in federal agriculture subsidies between 1995 and 2008. She says that money all stayed with her in-laws. In Congress, she tried to secure more than $3.7 million in federal earmarks for her district—the kind of pet projects she has blamed for excessive spending. And she railed against Obama’s $800 billion–plus Recovery Act as wasteful, then signed a half-dozen letters seeking stimulus funds for local projects. Her requests in 2009 echoed the arguments Republicans lampooned Obama for using. A bridge project could create nearly 3,000 jobs a year, Bachmann wrote, while a highway project would “promote economic prosperity.” 
 
 But far more damaging than the charge of double standards may be the growing realization among Americans of just how radical the Tea Party movement really is. The willingness of its most committed members to risk national default for the sake of achieving its political goals has no doubt contributed to the dramatic rise in the number of Americans who view the movement unfavorably. In a New York Times/CBS News poll published on Aug. 5, 40 percent of respondents described their opinion of the Tea Party as “not favorable”—up from 18 percent in April 2010. 
 
 At a time of population growth, increasing health-care costs, swelling ranks of retirees, and a sharp and prolonged economic slump—all of which point to the need for increases in federal spending just to meet government’s existing obligations—Bachmann and her Tea Party allies demand that Washington spend less. But they don’t just demand that spending increase less from year to year than previously planned; that’s what Congress and the president agreed to in the deal that ended the debt standoff, to the tune of $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years (albeit followed by a downgrade four days later). Rather, Bachmann and the Tea Party go much further, insisting that the federal government actually shrink over time, spending less money from year to year as its commitments grow. 
 
 That means, of course, that its commitments would have to shrivel as well. In the Tea Party’s ideal vision of America, large federal agencies and federal programs would be dismantled and the savings redirected to states with block grants and individuals through lower taxes. Whether that would leave people at the mercy of the freewheeling (and often treacherous) marketplace remains an open and untested question. 
 
 Asked if her positions are extreme, Bachmann replies that the Tea Party’s ideals are simply the most rational solutions to a broken and profligate government, and that the only option is to stand tough. “I do not twist in the wind,” she says proudly. 
 
 There’s no telling if Republican primary voters will reward such intransigence. Even within the Tea Party itself, Bachmann is a polarizing figure. Many—especially in Iowa, with its high percentage of evangelical Christians—respond rapturously to her combination of antigovernment fervor and religiously inspired moral traditionalism on issues like abortion and gay marriage. But others are more consistent in their distaste for governmental meddling. For Matt Welch, editor in chief of the libertarian Reason magazine, Bachmann isn’t the “queen of the Tea Party.” In fact, he says, “she will have trouble” with its rank and file “if she’s seen as being more concerned about social issues” than cutting the federal budget. 
 
 For Bachmann, those issues are personal. Raised a Lutheran, she says she converted to a “living faith” at the age of 16 after attending a prayer meeting with a friend. “All I can say is that, you know, the Holy Spirit knocked on my heart’s door,” Bachmann recalls. “I literally got on my knees with some of my friends and then confessed my sins …I gave my heart to Jesus Christ.” 
 
 Other criticisms of her candidacy point to what she’s done since arriving in Washington. “Her record in Congress is…great remarks and great speeches, but in terms of results and accomplishments, nonexistent,” says former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, whose presidential campaign has the most to lose in Ames. Bachmann dismisses the critique, hoping to convert a strong showing in the straw poll into momentum among voters and fundraisers elsewhere. 
 
 If there’s one threat on the horizon, it’s Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s expected entrance into the race. He, too, offers evangelical fervor coupled with a stand against big government. But he has something she lacks: an executive record as the longest-serving governor in a state that is thriving in hard times. It doesn’t seem to faze her. 
 
 For now, Bachmann revels in the Iowa crowds, which don’t fuss about the missing fine print behind her ideas, the perceived contradictions among them, or their radicalism. 
 
 David Dankel, a lifelong Democrat who voted for Obama, came to Ft. Dodge to see Bachmann because he was “tired of paying for everyone else.” In April, Dankel saw his $16-an-hour factory job of 23 years move to Mexico. “I was getting ahead and now I can’t find a job. Obama promised change—well, where is it?”
– Another tidbit from Michele Bachmann’s media victory lap today: On Meet the Press, Gawker notes, Bachmann dodged (and dodged again… and again…) David Gregory’s repeated attempts to get her to address her 2004 comments that being gay is “personal enslavement.” Instead, she consistently said, “I am running for the presidency of the United States,” and insisted she doesn’t judge gay people. She also would not call a gay couple with adopted children a “family,” instead insisting that such questions “aren’t what people are concerned about right now.” Though, Gregory noted, she once called such issues “defining political issues.”