Slave to ideology

Slave to Ideology

by digby

I'm sure you've all heard about the "Marriage Vow" put out by the looney tunes FAMiLY LEADER by now. (I just learned that the small "i" represents individual submission, which just creeps me out.)And this even creepier passage within it:


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.


Yes, a slave child was often more likely to be raised in a two-parent "household" --- by her slave mother and her white owner father. I would have thought that such an unorthodox arrangement would be slightly problematic for the strict nuclear family crowd. I guess as long as the Plantatation owner wasn't gay, they're fine with it.

And needless to say, one of the greatest tragedies associated with slavery was the cruel breaking up of families. Didn't these morons even watch Roots fergawdsake?

Or read the book they were citing?

“That’s just wrong,” Dr. Lorraine Blackman told me in a phone interview yesterday. Blackman is a professor at Indiana University’s School of Social Work and co-author of an authoritative 2005 study on marriage and Black families. That study, The Consequences of Marriage for African Americans, was cited by the pledge authors as the source for their controversial assertion.
Seriously, this assault on history gets more and more other-worldly every day.

Anyway, both Bachman and Santorum were eager to sign on as quickly as possible. But after the hubub, the the far right wingnut group that put out the pledge has now removed it, Bachman now says she didn't read it, and Santorum explains that what really threw him about the pledge was that it required personal fidelity to one's spouse. (This is not surprising considering Santorum's starring role in the cover-up of John Ensign's tawdry and bizarre affair.)

I'm sure this will only make their fans love them all the more. Victimized by political correctness once again.

It's going to be quite an election season.

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