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<div class="timestamp">October 13, 2012</div>
<h1>Bachmann Family Values</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by FRANK BRUNI"><span>FRANK BRUNI</span></a></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
Minneapolis </p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
“You’ve taken aim at me,” Helen wrote to Michele. Referring to Nia, she added: “You’ve taken aim at my family.” </p>
<p>
Michele, she said, never acknowledged the letter in any way. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
“I just wanted her to see me,” she said, “because it just feels, through the whole thing, like she hasn’t.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
She hopes to marry Nia in Minnesota someday. I asked if she would invite Michele to the ceremony. </p>
<p>
She fell silent a few seconds, then shook her head. “I don’t think it would be a very good fit,” she said. </p>
<div class="authorIdentification">
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