Michele Bachmann — "a freaking dwarf" — screamed "help!" when 2 women — women! — trapped her in a bathroom.

Listen the left-wing radio personality Randi Rhodes (from back in March 2010):



She's calling Michele Bachmann "a freaking dwarf." (Is it not politically incorrect to call a short person a "dwarf"? Isn't that like calling a person with a dark tan the n-word?) Anyway, I ran across that this morning because I was trying to find out how tall Michele Bachmann is. She's 5'2".

I wanted to know, because I've been looking at the accusations of homophobia that are being lobbed at Bachmann, and I noticed this story "Bachmann Feared Abduction by Lesbian, Ex-Nun":

Rep. Michele Bachmann, who is now seeking the Republication presidential nomination, had claimed in 2005 that she was almost abducted by two women in a bathroom, according to The Daily Beast.

The pair consisted of a lesbian and an ex-nun.

At the time of the alleged attempted kidnapping, Bachmann was a state senator from Minnesota and had already started to campaign against LGBT rights. She had previously been caught hiding in the bushes of a gay rights event.

Caught hiding in the bushes of a gay rights event? All right, this article — in The Advocate — makes no pretense of being unbiased. Let's switch over to the Daily Beast article whence these factoids were extracted. Oh! It's Michelle Goldberg. She doesn't provide a link to get us to the root of the "bushes" story, but let's not get distracted. Let's focus, for now, on the alleged kidnapping. Goldberg writes:

A few dozen people showed up at the town hall for the April 9 [2005] event, and Bachmann greeted them warmly. But when, during the question and answer session, the topic turned to gay marriage, Bachmann ended the meeting 20 minutes early and rushed to the bathroom. 

Causation or correlation? What do you think?

When a politician ends a meeting 20 minutes early and rushes to the bathroom, what do you think is more likely?
	She wanted to avoid the topic that had just come up.
	She really had to go to the bathroom.
	Both: stress over the topic brought on the bathroom urgency.
pollcode.com free polls

Back to Goldberg:

Hoping to speak to her, [Pamela] Arnold and another middle-aged woman, a former nun, followed her. As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. "Help!" she screamed. "Help! I'm being held against my will!"

Arnold, who is just over 5 feet tall, was stunned, and hurried to open the door. Bachmann bolted out and fled, crying, to an SUV outside. Then she called the police, saying, according to the police report, that she was "absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her." The Washington County attorney, however, declined to press charges, writing in a memo, "It seems clear from the statements given by both women that they simply wanted to discuss certain issues further with Ms. Bachmann."

From the police report:

BACHMAN [sic] STATED THAT WHEN SHE WAS GETTING READY TO LEAVE SHE WENT TO THE RESTROOM. SENATOR BACHMAN STATED THAT WHEN SHE WAS TRYING TO LEAVE THE RESTROOM, 2 WOMEN BLOCKED IN AND TOLD HER THEY WANTED TO CONTINUE TALKING. SEN BACHMAN STATED SHE WAS AFRAID AND SCREAMED FOR HELP. THE 2 WOMEN LET HER LEAVE THE RESTROOM WHEN SHE SCREAMED. THE WOMEN ARE BELIEVED TO BE W/ THE GLBT GROUP.

(Bachmann was a state senator at that time.) Following a public figure into the bathroom and pressing her with questions in that environment is bad etiquette, even if you are calm and friendly, but hostile questions and blocking the exit are completely unacceptable and threatening. Trapping someone in a room is false imprisonment, traditionally, and here's the Minnesota criminal statute: "Whoever, knowingly lacking lawful authority to do so, intentionally confines or restrains... [a] person without the person's consent, is guilty of false imprisonment...." You can go to prison for 3 years for that. I don't know the details underlying the decision not to prosecute.

Do Goldberg and The Advocate think that women are inherently so weak that you're hysterical to get scared when they confine/restrain you without your consent? Are women, especially short women, given special immunity to exercise physical intimidation? We're told that Arnold is "is just over 5 feet tall," but not that Michele Bachmann herself is tiny. That fact is omitted when the aim is to portray Michele Bachmann as homophobic, even as it is used gratuitously to mock her as "a freaking dwarf." How tall was the "ex-nun"? I'm not seeing that information. But we do get to know that she was an ex-nun, as if that's supposed to make her sound benign.

There's a big effort right now to propagate the meme that Michele Bachmann is a raging homophobe. I'm going to monitor that effort for you. I'm not a Bachmann partisan, as regular readers know. I've supported gay rights since long before I started this blog in 2004, and I am not a social conservative. This issue falls right into my zone as a blogger because: 1. I'm observing the 2012 campaign with cruel neutrality as a political independent, 2. I care about consistency in the way women are perceived and described, 3. I think opposition to some gay rights issues should not be conflated with hating or wanting to hurt gay people, and 4. The "Bachmann homophobia" issue is rife with the kind of lying and unfair reporting that I am on a mission to expose.