Comfortably quoting from scripture, the Minnesota congresswoman said it was her faith that drove her to push for a ballot measure to criminalize same-sex marriage in the state — something she said might be possible this year because both state legislative houses are held by Republicans.

"In 5,000 years of recorded human history... neither in the east or in the west... has any society ever defined marriage as anything other than between men and women," Bachmann said during the latest installment of the Iowa Family Leader's presidential lecture series. "Not one in 5000 years of recorded human history. That's an astounding fact and it isn't until the last 12 years or so that we have seen for the first time in recorded human history marriage defined as anything other than between men and between women."

Bachmann delivered a scathing critique against the Department of Education, "along with a few other agencies, by the way, that I think we can live without." Those include the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce. She said Planned Parenthood should lose its tax-exempt status — it's a nonprofit — and that Congress should use its power to limit the subjects that district courts can rule on.

That's because judges are "black-robed masters," she said, echoing a line she used during another recent trip to Iowa to lambaste the state Supreme Court justices whose ruling effectively legalized same-sex marriage in the state.

"That's what you had here in Iowa: black-robed masters," Bachmann said. "They are not our masters. They are not our morality. They are not put there to make the decisions."

Her speech was an hourlong introduction to the more than 100 social conservatives who came out for the Family Leader's presidential lecture series — organized by longtime conservative activist and 2010 gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats. Speaking in the auditorium at a Christian high school with "Those who hope in the Lord…shall mount up with wings as eagles…" printed on the cafeteria wall, Bachmann walked through her own conversion story — and reminded the audience of her Iowa roots.

"For seven generations, we had our family born here, raised here, all in northeastern Iowa," she said. "I feel like I know you, I'm one of you, and it's wonderful to be able to be here today."

Raised Lutheran, Bachmann said she found the Holy Spirit when she was 16 years old and in high school, a few years after her family moved to Minnesota.

"I hadn't come out of a wild drug addled life or anything like that, but it doesn't matter, I was still a sinner, and I knew it," she said. "At that moment, my whole life changed... and it's just like the Scripture says, and I became a new creation."

Bachmann, who is considering a bid for president in 2012 and has hired staff in Iowa, is a rare evangelical conservative firebrand in a field otherwise dominated by men who have backgrounds in business or as political operatives — a biography that could give her an advantage in Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucus next year.

April 11, 2011