Bachmann is a really scary person

[snousle]

This article from the New Yorker is one of the more alarming things I've read lately.

Here is a quote from a book that was on "Michele’s Must Read List":

Slavery, as it operated in the pervasively Christian society which was the old South, was not an adversarial relationship founded upon racial animosity. In fact, it bred on the whole, not contempt, but, over time, mutual respect. This produced a mutual esteem of the sort that always results when men give themselves to a common cause. The credit for this startling reality must go to the Christian faith. . . . The unity and companionship that existed between the races in the South prior to the war was the fruit of a common faith.

Of course, now she's trying to bury her specific, deliberate endorsements of several batshit-crazy Christian dominionists, and would not talk to the author about them. The idea that she is a serious contender for the presidency is just incredible.

Comments

[paulintoronto.livejournal.com]

She also signed that weird "pledge", you may recall, that originally stated that Black children were better off under slavery because their families were intact.

[equinas.livejournal.com]

Source?

[paulintoronto.livejournal.com]

Here are three. I could easily find a dozen or more additional ones. The details were widely reported at the time.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/republicans/8628717/Michele-Bachmann-signs-controversial-slavery-marriage-pact.html

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/07/bachmann_black_families_better_under_slavery_obama.php

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/07/bachmann-pledge-slavery-family-leader

[equinas.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thank you for an excellent example of liberals taking conservative statements completely out of context.

"Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into 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," the opening statement introducing the pledge read.

That statement says absolutely nothing about "endorsing slavery", and furthermore, it's absolutely correct.

I don't see what the point of signing this "pledge" was, and I don't support Bachmann, but I don't see anything wrong with that particular statement, other than being in poor taste and rather pointless.

[paulintoronto.livejournal.com]

I realize that it is impolite to engage in long discussion threads on someone else's blog, so I apologize for responding here, but I think you raise an interesting point about "context."

You say that liberals have taken this out of context, but it seems to me that the so-called liberal interpretation of the statement makes most sense in context. The comment on African-American families under slavery comes in the context of a pledge that is primarily about the overall importance of marriage and the family. This was explicitly an agreement on the part of the signatories to work to promote traditional marriage. Given that context, it is perfectly reasonable to read the slavery statement as implying that single-parent families are a worse evil than slavery. True, taking that position is not the same as actually "endorsing" slavery, but it does suggest a peculiar ideological indifference to the actual experience of being enslaved. That The Family Value removed the passage from future versions of the pledge indicates that even they recognized that the statement was indefensible.

[h0gwash.livejournal.com]

That's the whole point, that it's really in bad taste to say such a thing.

[barbarian-rat.livejournal.com]

You should see that this statement is completely with out any facts to back it up.
There is very little data on the parentage of slaves. Very few records were kept of slaves that denote ties between parents and children.
Any person tracing a black family's genealogy has a very difficult time connecting children to parents during that time period.
What the records do show is that slave families were, more often than not, broken up when their owners died and the decedent's "property", such as slaves, were either, divided up among the heirs, or sold off and then the proceeds divided among the heirs.
The families of slaves often consisted of men and women who lived on different plantations, who met at the various social functions in the area, considered themselves "married" and had children.
And let's not forget the very common practice of white men having sex with female black slaves and the children of those unions.
No, absolutely not. Black children born today are not less likely to be raised in a two parent household than slaves were.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Further, genetic evidence shows African Americans have about 20% European DNA. A rather large fraction of those two parent households were indeed women and their white rapist masters.