Bachmann Stands By Marriage Pact That Links Slavery to Black Family Values

Fox News ^ | July 9, 2011 | Stephen Clark

[ejdrapes]

Bachmann Stands By Marriage Pact That Links Slavery to Black Family Values
By Stephen Clark
Published July 09, 2011

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is standing firm behind a pledge she signed Thursday that promotes marriage and social conservative values, but includes a passage that suggests black families were in better shape during slavery.

The Family Leader, an Iowa-based conservative group led by Bob Vander Plaats, issued the pledge formally called, "The Marriage Vow – A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage and Family."

The two page document condemns gay marriage, abortion, pornography and infidelity. But perhaps the most controversial part is found in the preamble where the state of the black family in the slave era is compared to today.

"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 document reads.

Click here to read the document.

[NYCslicker]

“No one’s saying that we should fearfully coddle the left. Far from it. I think I’ve plainly indicated that the wording in the pledge (regarding black families under slavery) is accurate, but that it’s needlessly provocative.”

And, your reasoning goes, we should therefore fearfully coddle the Left by not signing it.

Let’s not “provoke” the Left! They are just in the process of tearing down the greatest country in the world and the most successful free government in the history of mankind.

But by all means, let’s not “provoke” them!

/sarcasm

[NYCslicker]

“I like Michelle but it is getting too darn easy to paint her as an extremist.”

She is an “extremist” compared to the wilting daisies in the Republican party. And I am too. I’m only voting for an “extremist” this time around. I want someone who is extremely serious about respecting the Constitution and balancing our budget.

[NYCslicker]

The drive-by media won’t need to tear down conservatives.

Conservatives and Republicans afraid of their own shadow will do the job for them.

Kind of sad really.

Then we all end up with Romney. Kind of makes you wonder what their real agenda is. . . .

[NYCslicker]

lol, that’s true

I was just testing you.

[Raider Sam]

Nothing needs to be reconciled. You asked what was lacking, and I told you the facts that show slaves grew up with both parents. There are no facts to show that either way, so for her, or you, or anyone else to make a statement in the affirmative that there is a worse percentage now than then is without basis.

Since there is no basis for the claim she is making (by signing on), then she is stupid for doing it.

[GJones2]

> This pledge thing is out of control.

I agree. I can understand why groups would wish to have candidates sign them, but there are so many groups with so many different interests, and it’s a lot to expect that candidates will stand by words that others have composed for them, rather than the ones that they themselves would choose. As long as other candidates are signing these pledges, though, refusing will be difficult.

I want candidates to take firm positions on the issues that I consider most important — and not change them without very good justification — but I don’t want their hands tied on nearly everything that could come up (or having to face the charge of having violated one of their many pledges).

[jla]

If blacks were never introduced in America do you believe, or not, that the country would have been better off?

[Liberty1970]

You can't substantiate that by citing a single reference. And to allude that blacks were better off, in any way, under slavery...borders on racism, at least.

Are you illiterate? That is not what the statement said. It made a very specific statistical comparison, which the leftists (yes, leftists) at Fox News are distorting, as are you.

The statement does not say slavery 'made' anything better. It states that by one measure, despite the anti-family impact of slavery, slaves were nonetheless better off than modern blacks. In other words, slavery is not as bad for black families as liberal policies.

[aruanan]

How many Africans brought to America as slaves-or born into slavery here - went back to Africa and the life they lived prior to slavery?

Somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 to Liberia.

Well, it wasn't back to the life they lived prior to slavery since some of them through the work of organizations dedicated to repatriation founded the colony of Liberia, capital, Monrovia, later to declare its independence in 1847 with about 3,000 settlers, who were known as Americo-Liberians. Throughout Liberian history they never amounted to more than 5% of the population. Culturally they were European-American in language, dress, architecture, education, and religion. They basically established a caste system with themselves at the top. Their control of the country lasted until 1980. As bad as it was, it's been an even greater mess ever since.

Also, some freed blacks continued to live in the South. Some became slave holders themselves, a few with rather large operations.

[PapaBear3625]

There was NOTHING GOOD that resulted from the enslavement of the Black man and I challenge anyone on this site or elsewhere to publicly proclaim otherwise. Expose yourselves.

Keith B. Richburg, in Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa proclaims otherwise. Go call HIM a racist.

If not for slavery, blacks would not have come to America in the first place. Go talk to any black man who has actually visited Africa and ask him if he would rather be living in Rwanda.

I'm flat-out tired of the whining. There is NOBODY alive today who is not descended from slaves. Slavery was the NORM for most of history. Serfs were effectively slaves. The Roman Empire had a high percentage of slaves (white ones, by the way) The very word "slave" comes from Slav, the eastern European Slavic people who were so heavily enslaved over the ages.

The Pharaohs kept slaves. The African kingdoms who sold slaves to the ships that carried them to the New World kept slaves. The American Indians kept slaves. The Muslims CURRENTLY keep slaves (discretely).

But you know what? It was the WEST that finally decided to END slavery, and worked to wipe it out over the world where ever it could be found.

Slavery ended in the US around 150 years ago. Everybody involved is long dead. Their children are long dead. The money made off of slaves was destroyed in the Civil War. It's over. Time to move on. And yes I will say the same to people who continue to lay a guilt trip over the Holocaust, the Japanese interment, etc. If everybody involved is dead, then it's history.

[Windflier]

Good lord. Didn’t read a word I wrote, did you?

Go yell at someone else. I’m busy.

[Sherman Logan]

You are correct. Few if any were ever able to return to the life they lived prior to being enslaved. In many cases their families or tribes had been destroyed and their homes and lands had been taken over by others.

But the probable maximum of perhaps 10,000 is for up to the 20s, in about a century, of American blacks who returned to Africa. The “colonizers” who believed they could remove 4M+ blacks so America wouldn’t have to deal with their presence were severely delusional.

[Windflier]

“Michele Bachmann reveals a dreadful lack of political savvy.”

Bill Clinton displayed political saavy. You want him back?

How witty.

You know, I see that sort of 'logic' displayed in comments on YouTube all the time. You might actually get a thumbs up over there, but here? Not likely.

[BuddhaBrown]

“Conservatives and Republicans afraid of their own shadow will do the job for them.”

Those sound like fightin’ words. Gov Walker just signed Concealed Carry here in WI yesterday. Draw! Notch.

I actually don’t mind a good long cage match of a primary. I will still vote for the guy who beat me up over Obama any day.

For example, Michele actually crushed a guy who is a friend of our family to start her career. By the way, she “didn’t have a chance” in that race either. I’m from her MN hometown (and his) so I am biased toward her in this race and still very much like the guy she beat.

I like Vin Webber too. TPaw’s main man. He’s a great guy. I don’t care that he said something potentially less than positive about fellow Minnesotan Michele this week. And she took no offense at all. And moved on.

[MestaMachine]

“Well I guess if THAT’s all she did then she’s a self-serving pig.”

There was no call for that and that is not what I said, or even close. In fact, I would never say such a thing about anyone who was trying to help children. I think you people are nuts. It’s for sure you are damned rude and nasty.
If you read the post I was responding to, the poster stretched it to the point where she was paying for the college education and masters degrees for 28 kids. That is a tad much, even for good samaritans. Nor did I say anything unkind about michele bachmann, period.
But you would rather put words in my mouth which I never said...or even thought. What kind of person does that make you?

[Mariner]

"If blacks were never introduced in America do you believe, or not, that the country would have been better off?"

The only differences I could project would be that we wouldn't have the Blues and the Statists in DC would not have prevailed so quickly over the states, as their primary ascendancy was driven by the Civil War.

[GJones2]

> “There are no facts to show that either way, so for her, or you [hopespringseternal], or anyone else to make a statement in the affirmative that there is a worse percentage now than then is without basis.”

Well, RINOs suck said, “One study of nineteenth century slave families (Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925) found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father.” (”Up to” is a rather suspicious word, though.) That’s some indication, for what it’s worth.

The phrase in the pledge “...in a two-parent household...” bothered me a bit, though. It evokes an image of a little cabin with a nuclear family — father, mother, and children. With less than 30% having that now, the current rate wouldn’t seem hard to beat, but many slaves didn’t live on large plantations like Gone with the Wind’s Tara. They were often dispersed into smaller groups and lived on smaller farms.

I don’t recall the exact percentages, but most slaveholders owned only a small number of slaves. (Besides having read that somewhere, I’ve seen indications of it myself in looking at census records.) Often they’d been bequeathed in wills to the various members of a slaveholding family. Though it’s possible that a black father would have more contact with his children then than in many families now, he might well live down the road on another farm, and not in his own two-parent household.

I’m a bit skeptical about this image of black slaves, mother and father, coming home from a hard day’s work in the fields to a nice, stable two-parent family. It’s true that there was moral pressure among slaveholders not to break up families, and especially not to separate mothers from relatively young children, but when it happened, the forcible separations were one of the cruelest things about slavery. Sometimes slaves were sold to distant parts of the country and never saw their family members again.

In discussing the family, it’s best to emphasize the relatively recent decline and not to make comparisons with slavery.

[Friendofgeorge]

Hey, I think you guys missed the sarcasm in my post. My dry sense of humor sometimes goes over peoples heads.

I was actually poking fun at MB. While it`s a good thing to offer yourself to the kids, the way she is shouting it from the roof top, is quite unattractive. I thought our charity is to be in secret?

Perhaps I have sponsored a number of children through World Vision...I said suppose. Now if I was to go around saying I give to this and I give to that...would sound not good.

So it turns out they were paid for taking the children in, her husband does not operate a not for profit practice, and it`s really in question how much they really did.

[Raider Sam]

I read that too, and I couldnt help wondering exactly what it meant. Does it mean that if a woman had 4 kids, that all four of them had the same father, does it mean that three of the four had the same father, or does it mean that three fourths of slave families had the same mother and father? But I dont read that statement to mean that the kids grew up with both parents. And in the post I received from Walter E Williams, the point he makes is the point you make at the end of your post. The black family was destroyed somewhere between the 30’s and the 70’s, and that should be the focus. His only mention of slavery is to show that at one time, blacks pulled themselves up that within 4 generations they had gone from being slaves to having stable families.

Unfortunately, I dont have a copy of Gutman’s book, so I cant look up the stats he uses. But the two links that were given to me as proof both only cited data from the 1880’s and up, and on whether those children had 2 parents. There was just no data presented about whether children grew up as slaves with both parents. So that is why I think Bachmann made a stupid move. The footnote in the pledge links to a document that does not have data to support the claim the pledge is making.

[aruanan]

The “colonizers” who believed they could remove 4M+ blacks so America wouldn’t have to deal with their presence were severely delusional.

You could probably say that those who thought things would be better for themselves if they went to Liberia were probably delusional also. Unless they were the very, very few who were able to occupy the highest levels of society there, their prospects and those of their descendants (at least up until the time LBJ started messing with them) were much better in the United States. They may have had the KKK and other Democrat racists to deal with here, but not the predations of the non-Americo-Liberian groups and finally folks like Charles Taylor.