Clinics Owned by Michele Bachmann’s Husband Practice Ex-Gay Therapy

(The Nation) -- 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.

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http://www.thenation.com/article/161883/%E2%80%98god-has-created-you-heterosexuality%E2%80%99-clinics-owned-michele-bachmann%E2%80%99s-husband-practi

Our tax dollars are going to support this shit? This is not therapy. This is proselytizing. Medicaid and Medicare should not fund clinics that tell teenage boys what is supposedly acceptable in God's eyes.  And I would point out that this young man was bullied into counseling by his stepfather for something that isn't even recognized as a disease by the medical establishment.  Why is this allowed to happen?