Michele Bachmann

A former beauty-pageant queen, Michele married Marcus Bachmann, a clinical therapist, in 1978. They knew each other since their undergraduate days. They are blessed with five children - Sophia, Elisa, Caroline, Harrison, and Lucas. From 1992 to 2000, they were licensed to provide foster care to a maximum of three foster children at a time, and have remained foster parents of 23 teenage girls to date.

The couple relocated to Stillwater, Minnesota, in 1988. They provide gay conversion therapy through their Christian counseling center, ‘Bachmann & Associates.’

On March 19, 2012, the couple and their three youngest children were granted Swiss citizenship. However, as reports of her dual citizenship started doing the rounds, she declared that she had decided to withdraw her Swiss citizenship by writing to the Swiss consulate.

She was born Michele Marie Amble on April 6, 1956, into a family of Norwegian ‘Lutheran Democrats,’ in Waterloo, Iowa, US. Her family relocated to Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, when she was a kid.

Following the divorce of her parents, David John Amble and Arlene Jean (née Johnson), in 1970, she started staying with her mother. Her mother worked at the ‘First National Bank’ in Anoka, Minnesota. Her father, an engineer, remarried and relocated to California. Her mother too remarried widower Raymond J. LaFave.

Michele attended the ‘Anoka High School,’ from where she graduated in 1974. She then worked on Kibbutz Be'eri in Israel for a summer. She studied at the ‘Winona State University’ and earned a BA degree in 1978. While in her senior year, Michele became a ‘Republican,’ although she belonged to a family of ‘Democrats.’

She attended the first class of the ‘O. W. Coburn School of Law’ in 1979 and graduated as part of its last class, obtaining a Juris Doctor (JD) degree in 1986. Thereafter, she attended the ‘William & Mary Law School,’ from where she earned an LLM degree in tax law, in 1988.

She served the ‘IRS’ as an attorney, from 1988 to 1993, before leaving the job to concentrate on motherhood after the birth of her fourth child.

Michele was involved with the pro-life movement, while she studied, and participated in sidewalk counselling outside abortion clinics with her then-fiancé, Marcus Bachmann. They advised and persuaded women against abortion. She has since then remained an advocate of sidewalk counselling.

She garnered immense media attention in 1991, when she participated in a pro-life protest event that involved the ‘St. Paul-Ramsey Medical Center’ (presently ‘Regions Hospital’) that conducted abortions. She attended a Ramsey County board meeting along with other pro-life citizens and opposed the allocation of public taxes to the hospital.

In 1993, she founded the ‘K-12 New Heights Charter School’ in Stillwater, with other parents, but resigned after six months, after the school developed a strong Christian orientation. Parents complained about the school not complying with its charter that mandated it to be non-sectarian in all its endeavors.

She opposed a state-mandated set of educational standards that paved her way to the political sphere.

She succeeded 18-year incumbent Gary Laidig, who was not endorsed for re-election in 2000, for the ‘Republican’ nomination for the position of the ‘state senator’ of Minnesota’s 56th district.