BACHMANN’S ‘Gay Cure’ CLINIC

Only days after her controversial connection to a marriage document which stated that black families were better off during slavery than they are today, Michele Bachmann is back in the news again — and not in a good way.

This time, it involves a business she and her husband own and operate in Minnesota. Bachmann and Associates is a Christian-based counseling clinic run by Marcus Bachmann, which counsels gay patients that prayer can cure them of their sexual orientation. Or in other words, he runs a “pray-away-the-gay” business, utilizing a Ph.D he received from an online correspondence school.  One such patient is Andrew Ramirez, who went to the clinic as a high school student in 2004. “The path for my therapy would be to read the Bible, pray to God that I would no longer be gay,” Ramirez said. “And God would forgive me if I were straight.”

John Becker, who is a gay activist with the group Truth Wins Out, said he posed as someone seeking counseling for homosexuality and took two hidden cameras into treatment sessions at the Bachmann clinic in Lake Elmo. “Based on my experiences at Bachmann and Associates, there can no longer be any doubt that Marcus Bachmann’s state and federally funded clinic endorses and practices reparative therapy aimed at changing a gay person’s sexual orientation, despite the fact that such ‘therapy’ is widely discredited by the scientific and medical communities,” Becker wrote on the Truth Wins Out website.

Marcus Bachmann has denied that he uses religious and prayer based counseling to rid patients of their sexual orientation, even though he is on record for calling gays “barbarians” and promoting the idea that homosexuality is both a choice and a threat. Surprisingly, Bachmann is not licensed with any official board that certifies mental-health professionals in his state, although Minnesota is one of the few states which allows unlicensed “therapists” to practice mental-health care.