[Vision2020] Bachmann Family Values

[Art Deco]

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October 13, 2012
Bachmann Family Values By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

Minneapolis

THERE are many people who are hurt by Michele Bachmann’s divisive brand of
politics, but perhaps none in quite the way that Helen LaFave is.

The two women once shared confidences. They’re family. Some 40 years ago,
Michele’s mother married Helen’s father, and when Michele was in college,
the house she returned to in the summer was the one where Helen, then
finishing high school, lived. Helen craved that time together.

“I remember laughing with her a lot,” she told me in an interview on
Thursday in her home here. She remembers Michele’s charisma and confidence,
too. “I looked up to Michele.”

As the years passed they saw much less of each other, but when their paths
crossed, at large family gatherings, there were always hugs. Helen was at
Michele’s wedding to Marcus Bachmann and got to know him. And Michele got
to know Nia, the woman who has been Helen’s partner for almost 25 years.

Helen never had a conversation about her sexual orientation with Michele
and knew that Michele’s evangelical Christianity was deeply felt. Still she
couldn’t believe it when, about a decade ago, Michele began to use her
position as a state senator in Minnesota to call out gays and lesbians as
sick and evil and to push for an amendment to the Minnesota constitution
that would prohibit same-sex marriage: precisely the kind of amendment that
Minnesotans will vote on in a referendum on Election Day.

“It felt so divorced from having known me, from having known somebody who’s
gay,” said Helen, a soft-spoken woman with a gentle air. “I was just
stunned.”

And while she never doubted that Michele was being true to her private
convictions, she couldn’t comprehend Michele’s need to make those
convictions so public, to put them in the foreground of her political
career, and to drive a wedge into their family.

She told Michele as much, in a letter dated Nov. 23, 2003. She sent copies
to her four siblings, her father and one of Michele’s brothers, and kept
one herself. In the letter she described her “hurt and disappointment that
my stepsister is leading this charge.”

“You’ve taken aim at me,” Helen wrote to Michele. Referring to Nia, she
added: “You’ve taken aim at my family.”

Michele, she said, never acknowledged the letter in any way.

Helen has spoken with journalists only a few times in the past and never at
length. During the Republican presidential primaries this year, she got
caller ID to screen all the entreaties from reporters looking for nasty
quotes about Michele. She didn’t want to play that game or upset her
family, which has been divided on same-sex marriage.

But the imminent referendum, which she described as Michele’s “very, very
sad legacy,” compelled her “to speak out for fairness for those of us who
are being judged and told our lives and relationships are somehow less,”
she said.

I’m encountering her kind of newfound boldness more frequently than I
expected and writing about same-sex marriage more than I anticipated, as
surprising voices weigh in, like the professional football players who took
up the cause last month.

Helen lives a quieter life than Michele. She’s 52 and works as a
communications manager for a Minneapolis suburb. Nia, 55, is a physical
therapist.

They never hid their relationship from their families, Nia said, though
they also didn’t force long-winded discussions about homosexuality. Their
philosophy, she said, was simply to “put it out there, show ’em who we are
and love ’em where they’re at, and everything will fall into place.” Their
goal was one of “killing them with kindness.”

They thought that was happening. At get-togethers, Nia received hugs from
Michele, who traded an “I love you” with Helen, as the two always had.

BUT in between Michele’s election to the State Senate in 2000 and her
upgrade to the United States House of Representatives in 2006, she nabbed
attention and amassed a fan base among religious extremists with her
homophobic pronouncements.

She publicly described homosexuality as “personal enslavement,” referred to
the heartache of having “a member of our family” who was gay and suggested
that gays and lesbians wanted to recruit impressionable youngsters, saying:
“It is our children that is the prize for this community.”

In her letter Helen appealed to Michele to rethink what she was doing,
explaining that she and Nia were motivated only by mutual caring and
respect and that marriage, if legal, would grant couples like them the
rights, responsibilities and financial protections that foster stability.

“Some people, you included, feel like you know the truth about my
relationship,” she wrote, adding: “I think you also believe you know what
God thinks of it.”

“Neither you nor I know,” she went on to say. “I suspect that we’re both
certain in our minds, but we don’t know.”

When Michele spoke at a State Senate hearing in 2006 about her desire for a
constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, Helen showed up, along
with several relatives who supported her.

“I wasn’t looking to make a public statement,” she told me. “I just
thought: I’m going to go there and sit there so she has to look at me. So
she has to look at Nia. I wanted her to see: this is who you’re doing this
to. It’s not some anonymous group of people. It’s not scary people. It’s
me. It’s Nia.” She paused, because she’d begun to sob.

“I just wanted her to see me,” she said, “because it just feels, through
the whole thing, like she hasn’t.”

Michele, now waging an unexpectedly tight re-election campaign for her
House seat, didn’t respond to a request for an interview for this column.

She and Helen have seen each other at family events twice in the last year
or so, Helen said, but Helen hasn’t insisted on a talk, because it seems
pointless to her. On one of those occasions, she recalled, Michele said “I
love you,” and Helen said it back. But Helen’s more confused by that than
ever.

As a congresswoman, Michele got tickets to President Obama’s inauguration
and gave a pair to Helen and Nia, knowing they’re Democrats and had rooted
for him. Helen thought that was kind, if not necessarily encouraging.

She hopes to marry Nia in Minnesota someday. I asked if she would invite
Michele to the ceremony.

She fell silent a few seconds, then shook her head. “I don’t think it would
be a very good fit,” she said.

•

I invite you to visit my blog <http://bruni.blogs.nytimes.com/>, follow me
on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on
Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/frankbruninyt>
.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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