Michele Bachmann Skirts Biblical Question

Michele Bachmann was asked at a debate recently whether she would be submissive to her husband if she was elected president. It was mentioned that she had once said that she didn't want to study tax law, but the Bible told her that she should be submissive to her husband and so she deferred to him and did what he suggested.

It was a few moments before Bachmann answered this question, both due to her likely having to think up a good answer without actually answering, and also because there was a lot of booing going on from the people in the audience.

Once the booing died down, she thanked the man for his question (although I thought it sounded a little sarcastic), and then proceeded to opine a bunch of bullshit that made no attempt at actually answering the question. She talked about how long she'd been married to her husband, and how much she loved him, but I didn't actually hear an answer in there anywhere. Maybe I zoned out and missed it?

But, to be honest, I wasn't expecting one. That's a loaded question for a regressive to have to answer. Usually, they immediately say they'd do whatever the Bible told them to do, but in certain cases even the most crazy and outrageous candidates are aware that they can't do that. The Biblical answer would have been yes, but then this would have raised other concerns. In that case, she would not really be president, her husband would be president. Sure, she'd be the one who got elected, but he would be the one pulling her strings. Also, it would piss off any regressive women who did not like the idea of deferring to their husband all the time.

So, she went with the safe answer. A perhaps smart, if rare, moment for Bachmann. Double-talk is nothing new to politics on both sides, but expect to hear most of it coming from the GOP.

The very idea that this can be a question in such a debate is outrageous, though. The GOP brings it in with their insistance on putting the Bible into law and politics. The Bible is rather misogynistic in nature. Just because men are men, we women should defer to them. We may not be legal property to them, anymore, but we are their spiritual property and there is nothing that says that that is at all a two-way street in the Bible that I've ever seen. I'm sure there might be a passage from Paul or something where he says men should try to be nice to their wives, but that's hardly good enough. You can be nice to a slave, but it doesn't change the fact that that person is a slave and that slavery is wrong. And that's exactly what a question like that assumes; that women are spiritual chattel to their husbands. It has no place in a debate, even when speaking to a member of the GOP.

Unfortunately, even insisting that its important due to knowing whether she would be leading or whether her husband would be leading isn't a good enough reason. She and her husband share the same belief systems and goals, from all that we've seen. It doesn't matter which one of them is pulling the strings, we get the same thing. Thus, the question was even more unnecessary and even more insulting to women than it ordinarily would have been.