Those progressives who chide Minnesota's glitter-bombing gay barbarian horde as "not helpful" in focusing media attention on the harmful, tax-funded "pray away the gay" therapy offered at Bachmann & Associates clinic might need to think that through a bit.
Or at least not take their cues from the Right.
When the Right--like GOProud or Glenn Beck--weighs in with advice that a strategy isn't "helpful," that unsolicited advice from the other side of the aisle is a sign that the action is effective.
Any time the Right--like Glenn Beck or True North-- trots out an absurd argument that claims if those in an action did something else, other than what actually happened, they'd be dangerous, that tactic is working.
It's clear from latest news that the Bachmann campaign doesn't want to answer to barbarians or to the traditional media, but to shove this issue back into the closet. TPM reports that the Bachmann campaign is aggressively acting to stifle any scrutiny of the clinic, in which the presidential candidate is a co-owner, by the traditional media.
The Minnesota Independent reported that the Christian counseling clinic has taken in $137,000 in Medicaid payments over the last several years.
Bachmann campaign snubs questions in Iowa
At TPM, Igor Volsky reports in Bachmann Campaign Takes Retribution Against Local Iowa Station That Asked About Ex-Gay Clinics:
Earlier this month, after an undercover investigation confirmed that Marcus Bachmann’s Christian counseling clinics performed ex-gay therapy, Michele Bachmann was asked about the practice by Iowa’s WQAD, a local ABC affiliate. The Congresswoman refused to comment on the matter, saying only that she is “very proud of our business” and “proud of all job creators in the United States.”
During the interview, Bachmann’s advisers reportedly “threatened WQAD producers that they would cut off the feed if Rae Chelle [the anchor] repeated the question.”
The TPM report cites WQAD's most recent and more troubling report, Bachmann walks away from WQAD:
Michele Bachmann made a visit to the Quad Cities last night to speak with supporters and give interviews to the local television media, that is, with one exception. Despite promises to WQAD for a one-on-one interview the Congresswoman's managers openly, and aggressively denied News 8 access to the Iowa Republican front-runner.
At the end of last night's event the Bachmann campaign said the snubbing was based on interview questions News 8's Rae Chelle Davis asked the Congresswoman during a satellite interview two weeks ago. . . .. . .Voters wanted to know if the story [about gay reparation therapy at the Bachmann & Associates clinic] was true and to hear what Michele Bachmann had to say about it.
But the Bachmann campaign isn't just snubbing one station. It's actively and aggressively stifling all questions from the media about the clinic's controversial practice. The WQAD report continues:
Then the same man came over and said I could have my interview outside," said Chuck McClurg a veteran News 8 photojournalist.
McClurg continued to shoot the event. Afterwards, he walked with the Congresswoman and her team down the stairs and out the door.
"I followed them outside hoping to get the interview I was promised," said McClurg
McClurg began rolling his camera as another local Quad Cities news station started asking their questions.
"I started to tape something off of that interview and a staffer pushed me aside and stood in front of my camera and said that this was for the other station only."
The reporter asked a question about Bachmann's clinic and her husband. At that point, McClurg says the staffer took the microphone off of Bachmann, tossed it to the reporter and said their interview was over.
That's the treatment a second reporter, from another station, received at the hands of the Bachmann campaign.
And this isn't the first issue over which Bachmann's campaign mishandled the press corps. Earlier, the Washington Post reported Michele Bachmann’s handlers get rough with reporter over a question about the candidate's migraines. Those questions emerged following a hit piece in the conservative Daily Caller, Stress-related condition ‘incapacitates’ Bachmann; heavy pill use alleged.
Why the clinic questions matter
Why do these questions matter? After the first WQAD interview, in Michele Bachmann Clinic: Where You Can Pray Away the Gay?, ABC News asked the American Psychological Association about "reparative" therapy:
The controversial practice of trying to change someone's sexual orientation was roundly discredited by the American Psychological Association in 2009 as ineffective and potentially harmful. The first-hand accounts and video evidence surfacing Monday have rekindled questions about the Bachmann family business.
Clinton Anderson, who heads the association's Office on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Concerns, told ABC News that his organization did an exhaustive review and found no evidence that efforts to convert someone from gay to straight could succeed.
"The harm is that when people are already in distress, and feeling conflict about their religion and their sexuality, to tell them they can change if they work hard enough, when in fact they can't do that … just makes their distress and their shame -- their depression -- even worse," Anderson said.
Enter the barbarians
So what is to be done when a candidate's campaign literally disconnects from reporters' questions? The question about the clinic's offerings are a matter of public concern on several levels. First, taxpayer dollars are going toward the operation of the clinic, and the public has a right to know whether its money is being spent wisely.
Second, the therapy is harmful. It hurts real people who come to the clinic seeking help.
But when a campaign dodges questions and seeks to shove questions back into a closet, it becomes fair game for publicity stunts. These stunts are common enough, regardless of the motivation: from the College Republican who dresses like an ear of corn to support ethanol after a candidate flubs an answer about E85 to an alt-journo crank yanker's style "Koch Brother" phone call to Governor Walker.
And in LGBT politics, there's a long history of civil disobedience and street theater that paralleled the activism of the more respectful and respectable organizations like the HRC. Witness ACT-UP's strategies during the AIDS crisis.
Now, Get Equal is helping the glitterati, LGBT activists and allies who recently took Marcus Bachmann's barbarian remarks quite literally and decided to dress the part while visiting Bachmann & Associates to demand the discipline that Marcus Bachmann prescribed for them. Failing to receive the discipline they craved, they acted like joyous barbarians, dancing and throwing glitter over their heads.
The Youtube went viral, from organizer Nick Espinosa's "Robert Erickson" facebook page to the Washington Post. A story that might have been a blip in the news cycle--easily swept into the closet by the Bachmann campaign--enjoyed a glittery second act.
Not Helpful: GOProud,Glenn Beck and Bill Prendergast react
The reaction to that second act from the right was predictable, the cable equivalent of the neighbor stomping out the fire on the go-bang-go bag on his doorstep. The Daily Caller posted a video, GOProud: Glitter bombing the “stupidest thing I’ve seen in politics”.
The now out-foxed Glenn Beck threw a rhetoric bomb in Glenn Beck on 'Gay Barbarian Horde' Glitters Bachmann Clinic, breathing pretty hard when he imagined a frightened clinic receptionist, but not before noting the "violent" protest "wasn't helpful." Locally, and more hilariously, a conceptual-challenged right-wing blogger sounded the alarm about glitter bombers ramping up. The glitterati throw glitter; indeed, in the latest action, they throw it above themselves. Only in the blogger's fecund imagination is anything other than glitter flying. She should stick to critiquing office design.
Let me repeat two universally acknowledged facts about strategy and tactics:
Anytime the Right weighs in with advice that a strategy isn't "helpful," that unsolicited advice from the other side of the aisle is a sign that the action is effective (as the hit count on the Youtube also suggests).
Anytime the Right trots out an argument that claims if those in an action did something else, they'd be dangerous, that tactic is working. For the truth is, the gay barbarian horde threw glitter. Nor has anything other than glitter been thrown with each additional action. But, Beck's own rhetoric and suggestions for countering glitterbombing is, on other hand, getting more charged, with thinly veiled threats that security officers might cap a gay barbarian.
Bluestem agrees with the need for calling the fashion police that's implied in Wonkette's headline, Mismatched Youths Attempt to Glitter Bomb Marcus Bachmann. BSP fears these barbarians will wear white to their after-Labor Day actions, so perhaps a past wardrobe designer for Xena could stage an intervention.
But Wonkette Burke's hipster summary of the strategy/tactic is dead on:
But it is 2011 now, and young activists require tactics that not only prove a point, but provide really hilarious videos to post to the YouTube. This is why we now have “glitter bombing!” The young people love to do the glitter bombing, because they get to throw stuff on hate-mongering anti-gay wack jobs and gain Internet celebrity while also participating in the democratic process.
And singing, dancing and laughing while they do it. The right provides its own chuckles as they pass out over the WMD potential of glitter, while simultaneously sniffing at the ineffectiveness of the protests. (Of course they want it both ways). Both the action and the reaction kept the story in the news cycle that Bachmann owns a clinic that practices a discredited and harmful therapy.
But since the Right criticized the tactic as not "helpful" for recognition of equality, as well as scary, the knee-jerk section of the progressive movement instantly surrendered, as is so often the case in American politics. Witness Bill Prendergast at the Minnesota Progressive Project, yelling at those kids to get off his turf because they couldn't possibly know what they're doing.
And now, back to the news
What did the glittery gay barbarians accomplish? Several more days of the story in the news cycle, and hundreds of thousands of more people knowing that there's a story here at all.
And so, with as new reports surface about the Bachmann campaign's attempt to suppress news inquiry about the clinic's practices, those folks have a glimmer of what this story is about.
Screenshots: Chuck McClurg, WQAD photojournalist (above); Mismatched gay barbarian horde (below). Video (below) via WQAD.
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