Right Wing Watch’s Brian Tashman notices that the Tea Party Nation is increasingly embracing a reactionary social issues agenda at odds with its economic focus and is now calling on supporters to rally behind Michele Bachmann and her husband’s ex-gay clinics. In an email to activists, the group’s president Judson Phillips defended Marcus Bachmann’s description of gay people as “barbarians” and asked members to “stand with the Bachmanns“:

The liberal freak show is coming after Michele Bachmann. That is not much of a surprise. Bachmann is running a very disciplined campaign, encouraging conservatives and running with a conservative agenda. But now the left is coming after her.

The left wants to use the gay rights issue against her. Bachmann’s husband, Marcus is a therapist and according to the left, he has committed a horrible crime. He used therapy to help gays who did not want to be gay any more change. [...] Most Americans do not believe gay marriage is a good thing. Most Americans do not believe homosexuality (which is only 1-3% of the population) is a good thing, though most Americans are tolerant of most things.

The left is not tolerant. The left never allows dissent. To the horror of Americans, Marcus Bachmann once referred to gays as “barbarians.”

Barbarians? If you are a conservative you have been called much worse and usually in much more obscene terms, for being a conservative.

The group joins a long list of conservative organizations in supporting Michele and Marcus Bachmann, reiterating the notion that at the root of almost all anti-gay policies is the misguided belief that gay people choose to be gay and can change their sexual orientation through prayer and therapy.

This Wednesday, the Senate will hold a hearing on the repeal of the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. The Republicans have invited three anti-gay voices to defend the law, all of whom have prominent reputations for demonizing the LGBT community. Notably absent, though, is any representative from the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a group that has led the charge against equality in the national debate but which lost recent fights against same-sex marriage in New York and civil unions in Rhode Island.

Here is a quick look at the anti-gay reputations that precede these witnesses:

- AUSTIN R. NIMOCKS (ALLIANCE DEFENSE FUND): ADF is one of the chief legal cogs in the conservative Christian propaganda machine. The group regularly opposes LGBT equality through the spreading of falsehoods and has previously partnered with Exodus International, which administers harmful ex-gay ministries. (Exodus calls ADF a “friend.”) The organization is vigilant about putting same-sex “marriage” in condescending mocking quotes (even using SS”M” for short-hand in tweets) to imply that the unions of same-sex couples will always be inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. Simultaneous with these bullying tactics, ADF promotes the idea that anti-gay Christians are the victims of “bigotry” and “intolerance” against “religious freedom.”

- TOM MINNERY (FOCUS ON THE FAMILY): FOTF maintains ties to many state-level anti-equality groups and is helping them raise over $6 million to fight marriage equality over the next year through the covert “Ignite An Enduring Cultural Tradition” campaign. The group also inherited the “Day of Dialogue” (formerly “Day of Truth”) from ADF, which encourages Christian youth to be vocal about their anti-gay beliefs to show “love”  to their LGBT peers who are “hurting” and “vulnerable.” Last April, Minnery clarified that FOTF would oppose an openly gay nominee to the Supreme Court because homosexuality is sinful.

- ED WHELAN (ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER): This will not be Whelan’s first trip to the Hill to challenge marriage equality. He testified in favor of DOMA in April, wherein he attacked the Obama administration for “doing whatever it can to promote same-sex marriage.” Equality Matters points out that Whelan has been on a “never-ending crusade” against LGBT equality, focusing in particular on the trial to overturn Proposition 8. He recently argued that Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling against the law should be vacated because as a gay man, Walker’s impartiality “might reasonably be questioned.”

The Democrats’ speaker list includes Joe Solmonese (Human Rights Campaign President) and Evan Wolfson (Freedom to Marry President), as well as three individuals who were in or are in same-sex marriages: Susan Murray, Andrew Sorbo, and Ron Wallen.

During an appearance on Bryan Fischer’s radio show on Friday, the FAMiLY LEADER’s Bob Vander Plaats — who recently released a radical marriage fidelity pledge that has created a rift within the 2012 presidential field — doubled down on his inaccurate claim that African Americans had stronger families during the time of slavery and blamed ThinkProgress for leading a misinformation campaign that forced the group to retract it:

VANDER PLAATS: We even said slavery was disastrous for families, but then we pointed out that children you know born in slavery, as awful as that was, were more likely to be born to a mom and a dad than African American children born today. Because 70 percent of African American children are born outside of wedlock… But what happened is that the leftist blog ThinkProgress they said that what what were saying is that slavery is better for families than they are today. And that’s absurd.

Watch it:

Contrary to Vander Plaats’ accusations, ThinkProgress never reported that the group wanted to bring back the institution of slavery. We argued that the group’s contention that African American children were born into wedlock during the period of slavery was historically inaccurate. As Zack Ford wrote in a July 8 post, “slaves were property and could not be party to a contract, including a marriage contract” and were thus not legally married in the eyes of the government. The slavery language did elicit furious responses from many African-American bloggers, however. Cheryl Contee of Jack and Jill politics wrote, “Given that families were broken up regularly for sales during slavery and that rape by masters was pretty common, this could not be more offensive. I mean, putting aside the statistics on this, which are likely off-base, I could not be more angry. When will Republicans inquire with actual Black people whether or not we’re ok with invoking slavery to score cheap political points? It has to stop.”

Vander Plaats also tried to put a positive spin on the growing concerns within the Republican party that Vander Plaats and his group may be be alienating conservative and independent voters. Addressing Mitt Romney’s dismissal of the pledge as “undignified and inappropriate”, Vander Plaats said Romney has flip flopped on marriage issues, but offered, “the good news about Mitt Romney is that he ended by saying he is firmly for one man, one woman marriage.” Vander Plaats added, “We feel good that Tim Pawlenty and Herman Cain at least would say they they agree with us in the pledge.”

Gary Johnson and Newt Gingrich have also rejected the Pledge.

At a campaign stop in Spartanburg, South Carolina last week, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum suggested that the government should discriminate against same-sex couples and show a “bias” in adoptions toward placing children only with married opposite-sex couples:

SANTORUM: But what I believe is that government should have a bias, a bias in favor of what is best for society, a bias in favor of what is proven to be best for children, which is the future of society.

From just the standpoint of how do children who are born out of wedlock do with respect to their educational achievement, their professional achievement, with respect to their criminal record, with respect to drug use, with respect to having children out of wedlock themselves, with having broken families themselves — how do they do? In every measure — every measure, overwhelmingly — they do worse.

Individuals don’t live alone. Individuals don’t function alone. They function in a unit that builds something that can be a foundation, and that is the family.

Watch it:

Santorum believes that same-sex couples should not have the “privilege” to adopt children because the aren’t “as good” as their opposite-sex counterparts — an argument that’s disputed by scientific evidence. For instance, “Scholars, at USC and New York University, looked at a range of existing studies, including research on gay and lesbian parents, finding that it’s ideal if a child is raised by two parents who are ‘responsible, committed, stable,’ but that the gender doesn’t cause radical differences.” The American Psychological Association has also concluded that “beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents have no empirical foundation. Lesbian and heterosexual women have not been found to differ markedly in their approaches to child rearing.”

Last week, Santorum became the second presidential candidate to sign the FAMiLY LEADER’s marriage pledge, which calls for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning same-sex marriage and suggests that homosexuality and a public health hazard. Santorum said he was “taken aback” by some of the language in the pledge, but felt compelled to sign it nonetheless.

Although she is hesitant to discuss same-sex marriage in her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, as a state senator from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann railed against it to curry favor with social conservatives and win her congressional seat, the New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Solberg reported over the weekend. In fact, “same-sex marriage was not much of an issue” in the state before the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that denying marriage rights to gay people was unconstitutional in 2003 and Bachmann “sprang into action,” holding press conferences declaring that allowing gay people to marry represented the number one threat to the state.

Bachmann was routinely “trotting out junk science and debunked claims that being gay is a choice” and embraced the same kind of ex-gay reparative therapy her husband Marcus Bachmann is practicing in the couple’s Christian counseling clinics:

When Out Front Minnesota, a gay rights group, conducted lobbying days at the Statehouse, Mrs. Bachmann made clear she was opposed to its agenda, which included legal recognition of domestic partnerships and nondiscrimination initiatives. Sometimes she would meet gay constituents with guests of her own, said Monica Meyer, the group’s executive director. “She had ex-gay people,” Ms. Meyer said, “who would tell her constituents that being gay was wrong and immoral.” [...]

“We’re seeing the fulfillment of the Book of Judges here in our own time — every man doing that which is right in his own eyes,” she warned the hosts of one radio show, “Prophetic Views Behind the News.” She went on: “They aren’t interested in being Ward and June Cleaver, that’s not what it’s about. They want legitimization, and they want to force us to shut up about our opposition to the gay lifestyle.”

Bachmann describes her decision to take up the same-sex marriage issue in 2003 as a call from God, saying that when Massachusetts’ marriage equality decision came down, “I heard the news on my local Christian radio station in Minneapolis, St. Paul and I was devastated.” Additionally, “I took a walk and I just went to prayer and I said Lord, what would you have me do in the Minnesota state senate? And just through prayer I knew that I was to introduce the marriage amendment in Minnesota,” she said during an April appearance before the FAMiLY LEADER.

In 2004, she even attended an ex-gay conference in Minnesota and commended the group for spreading the “truth” about people who have “deep emotional wounds” from homosexuality. Last week, Organizers for Exodus International, an “ex-gay” organization, announced that they will hold the national “Exodus Freedom” conference in St. Paul, Minnesota in July 2012. It’s unclear if Bachmann will again be “called” to endorse the event.