Bachmann to Students: No Right to Same-Sex Marriage

A couple of students from Iowa's Waverly High School, including the president of the school's gay-straight alliance, took on Michele Bachmann over her anti-marriage equality stand at a Wednesday campaign appearance by the presidential hopeful.

According to The Des Moines Register, at a pizza restaurant in Waverly, Jane Schmidt, president of Waverly High's Gay-Straight Alliance, asked Bachmann, "Why can't same-sex couples get married?"

Replied Bachmann, apparently thinking of gay individuals rather than same-sex couples: "They can get married, but they abide by the same law as everyone else. They can marry a man if they're a woman. Or they can marry a woman if they're a man."

As Schmidt and schoolmate Ella Newell pressed Bachmann on the issue, the candidate refused to budge, giving answers such as "There are no special rights for people based upon your sex practices" and "Every American citizen has the right to avail themselves to marriage but they have to follow what the laws are. And the laws are you marry a person of the opposite sex." The Register pointed out, however, that laws in Iowa and several other states allow same-sex couples to marry.

The two students were much in the minority at the gathering; the crowd of about 65 consisted largely of middle-aged and older people who supported Bachmann, a conservative Republican congresswoman from Minnesota. One of the few younger men in the audience told Schmidt and Newell they should "emulate" Bachmann. Read the full report here, and watch video, courtesy CNN, below, in which Bachmann also says Christians are being oppressed in public schools and promises to abolish the U.S. Department of Education.