The Pulse: How Bachmann lost a young conservative

Michele Bachmann, meet Ben Haney.

In other circumstances, Ben could have been a real asset to your campaign. He's a 28-year-old Republican with experience as a traveling advance man for John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008. Ben was born and raised in the critically important suburbs of Philadelphia. Having taught government at a high school, Ben now runs his own real estate investment company and co-owns a bar in Old City. In fact, one of his business partners is Rob McElhenney, star and creator of the TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Ben was raised Catholic. He was educated by the Jesuits at St. Joseph's Prep and graduated from Notre Dame after spending a semester interning for Sen. Richard Lugar (R., Ind.) in Washington. Ben comes from a great family and I can personally attest to his character. For two summers he interned for my talk-radio program (on a station that then featured conservative icons Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity). I will never forget the day he jumped unsolicited into his car and drove three hours to the nation's capital to stand in line and pay his respects to President Ronald Reagan as the Gipper lay in state - all while providing my listening audience with live reports.

Ben is troubled by your signing of a 14-point pro-marriage pledge at the request of the Family Leader, an Iowa social conservative group. It's not only the part about black kids being better off under slavery than they are today that caught his eye. (Yes, he knows that language was dropped after you signed the pledge.) It's the verbiage about sexuality being a choice.

You signed a document that challenges the belief that sexuality is predetermined. The Family Leader pledge laments that marriage is "debased" by, among other things, an "antiscientific bias which holds, in complete absence of empirical proof, that nonheterosexual inclinations are genetically determined, irresistible, and akin to innate traits like race, gender, and eye color."

See, my friend and former intern Ben is gay. And he never made any such choice.

Your thinking is nothing new and it runs in your family.

In 2004, at the National Education Leadership Conference, you said of the gay lifestyle: "It's a very sad life. It's part of Satan, I think, to say this is gay. It's anything but gay."