Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann's new Iowa campaign co-chair recently claimed that marriage equality would lead to people marrying objects like the Eiffel Tower. In a statement on the campaign's website last week, Bachmann's
November 22, 2011

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann's new Iowa campaign co-chair recently claimed that marriage equality would lead to people marrying objects like the Eiffel Tower.

In a statement on the campaign's website last week, Bachmann's Iowa Campaign Manager Eric Woolson said that he was "proud" to welcome Tamara Scott as the Iowa co-chair because she "understands the critical time we are in."

Scott, who also serves as state director for Concerned Women for America, led the fight last year to remove three justices from the Iowa Supreme Court who ruled to legalize same sex marriage, according to Right Wing Watch.

Speaking in June to Bob Vander Plaats, president of the conservative advocacy group The Family Leader, Scott warned that allowing gays to marry was a slippery slope that could lead to "polyamory" and "objectum sexualism," meaning that people could marry objects.

"I even have articles on polyamory," she told Vander Plaats. "There are sects of polyamory. Those are people who are involved in a committed relationship, a man and a wife, or a boyfriend and a girlfriend, and that is their committed relationship. And then they have several other relationships in combination with that."

"We didn't bring up the objectum sexualism," she continued. "I don't know if you've seen this one, where a woman marries the Eiffel Tower. Or someone marries an object. I know you at home are thinking this woman is nuts. I'm not making it up. ... The red herring will be the headline of tomorrow, of ten years if we don't deal with it today."

While there is no evidence that same sex marriage is a slippery slope to "objectum sexualism," Scott was correct that a woman did once claim she was married to the Eiffel Tower.

Erika La Tour Eiffel, a former U.S. soldier, said she married the landmark in 2007 and later took it as her last name. In 2008, she finally consummated the marriage by straddling one of the iron beams naked.

"I will tell you that I know love is being reciprocated," she told ABC News in 2009.

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