Rep. Michele Bachmann, who in the latest Iowa poll is in a virtual tie with Mitt Romney, used her first TV ad the other day to promise that she will under no circumstances vote to raise the debt ceiling, thus setting the ideological bar that much higher for the rest of the presidential field....

The pledge (which comprises two pages of pledge, two pages of endnotes) covers a lot more than just marriage.

There is, for example, this gratuitous reference to slavery in the preface to the pledge:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born in to slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African- American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.