by Ben Stupendous

May 21, 2012, 1:00 PM

Allen Quist is the prototype

Mother Jones published an article on Monday that nicely covered all of Allen Quist’s greatest hits. From “humans and dinosaurs coexisted,” to “women are genetically predisposed to subservience.”

It’s almost too much pure, unadulterated Quist for one to take in a single article. Almost.

Luckily for you and me I had some stronger than usual smelling salts at my side to help keep my attention focused during the course of the article. And that, dear readers, is what I do for you to bring you hot, uncut Quist.

As a Minnesota state representative in the 1980s, Quist staked out a position on his party’s far-right wing. At the time, the state’s GOP was undergoing a rightward shift from a party known for its mild-mannered moderates to one populated by family values firebrands. Quist was the tip of the spear.

And some tip he was!

During his time as a state representative, Quist slammed a gay counseling clinic at Mankato State University by comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan (both would be breeding grounds for evil—AIDS, in this case)

You have to give him some credit here for resisting the urge that I’m sure was there to go Godwin (before there even was such a thing!) and compare the gays to the Nazis. This is an early example of Quist’s cautious and compassionate nature.

and went undercover at an adult bookstore and a gay bathhouse in an effort to prove to a local newspaper reporter that they had become a “haven for anal intercourse.”

This is how you know that Allen Quist is the real deal. Not only is he anti-gay, but he actually went so far as to suppress his totally hetrosexual urges and go undercover in the gay community. I mean how could he really know for sure if these infernal places were really havens for anal intercourse?

The only way anyone could, to engage in gay anal intercourse. With gay men. At bathhouses and bookstores.

So when Allen Quist says that gay men are engaging in gay anal intercourse in bathhouses and bookstores, he’s knows from personal experience. This is the singularly amazing person that is Allen Quist.

But did others understand his quest to infiltrate the gays? Hardly.

Quist’s almost singular focus on sexuality didn’t go unnoticed. “At one point,” the St. Petersburg Times reported in 1994, “a Senate leader suggested he had an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, having devoted 30 hours to it in a single session.”

Unhealthy? Thirty hours of sex talk in a single legislative session seems quite paltry to me. I would certainly advocate more sex talk at the Capitol, and given the developments at the end of last year I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Quist was a staunch pro-lifer who once argued that abortion should be classified as a first-degree homicide.

Only a first-degree homicide Allen? This must have been said in one of his flights of liberal fancy. Serious pro-lifers these days agree that first-degree murder charges are far too lenient a punishment for people who kill fetuses. The chic thing to advocate now is nothing less than drawing and quartering.

When his pregnant wife died in a car accident in 1986, Quist had the six-and-a-half-month-old fetus placed in his wife’s arms in an open casket at the funeral.

This is like the mount Everest of pro-life actions. Or the K2 maybe. Clearly Allen Quist is serious about this shit.

A year later, he married Julie Morse, a former pro-choice feminist who had been reborn as a Republican activist. (Morse had cofounded Minneapolis’ first feminist bookstore, Amazon Books; originally based on the front porch of a women’s collective, it soon migrated to the city’s Lesbian Community Center.)

As opposed to finding a woman who already shared his beliefs about the role of women, Allen Quist manned up and converted a feminazi to the cause. Kudos Allen.

In 1993, after returning to his corn and soybeans farm outside the small town of Norseland, Quist bucked his party by challenging the incumbent Republican governor, Arne Carlson, for the gubernatorial nomination. Quist stayed true to his roots.

Allen Quist was running against RINO’s way before it was the in thing to do. Not only that, he defeated the MN GOP’s ultimate RINO, Arne Carlson, for the parties endorsement. Of course, Arne went on to win the primary election and get re-elected as Governor, but that’s besides the point.

Quistmania had arrived.

He called for mandatory AIDS testing as a prerequisite for obtaining a marriage license. And more than a decade before it emerged as a national issue, he campaigned against the advent of same-sex marriage in the Minnesota, running ads in which a priest marries two men, “Mike” and “Steve,” and pronounces them “man and man.”

Allen Quist was almost the first to use the now ever present “it was Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve” meme so popular these days. Yet another example of how Allen Quist personifies the bleeding edge of conservative politics.

In one memorable interview, Quist told a British reporter he believed women were “genetically predisposed” to be subservient to men, pointing to, among other things, the behavior of wild animals.

Clearly this is another flight of liberal fancy, every true believer knows that genetics are bunk. They’re just another example of greedy scientists chasing fat grants.

Quist’s candidacy quickly became a national story—one that sent the state’s moderate party establishment scrambling to avert disaster. Mike Triggs, a former Carlson aide, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Mr. and Mrs. Gopher are going to think [the Quists] are damn weird.” He dismissed Quist supporters as “zombies.” The governor himself played up his opponent’s under-the-covers ops. “Instead of prowling through dirty bookstores, why didn’t he go out and change state spending policy?” the governor asked the Associated Press.

As every public policy 101 student can tell you, it’s impossible to change state spending policy until you stop the gays from having gay sex in bookstores and bathhouses. I guess I’m not really surprised though that the RINO Carlson wouldn’t know this.

Carlson, who went on to beat Quist by 20 points, is still sore. “Wonderful, wonderful guy—one of the great intellectuals of the 21st century,” he deadpanned when asked about Quist recently. “He’ll do a lot to improve the IQ of Congress. If we can get a Bachmann-Quist team together, they could probably take over the world. Talk about a dynamic duo!”

If there’s anything that Allen Quist would want more from Arne Carlson than disdain, I don’t know what it is. So, way to stay classy Arne!

The article goes on from there, explaining the how Allen Quist passed his very special brand of conspiracy-theology (or theology-conspiracy) politics on to none other than Michele Bachmann, who would go on to take it national. The rise of the Quistlings as its now known.

But make no mistake, Allen Quist is the prototype in who’s image Michele and all the other little Bachmannites are made.