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.
> “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.
They would not have suddenly started living in stable family situations immediately if they had never done so before.
This is not some wild, unsubstantiated claim that you are making it out to be. At best it is arguable.
Listen, there are two ways you can go with political candidates. The left insulates theirs against any and all criticism and hides every inconvenient gaff. This produces moral monsters like Ted Kennedy and incompetents like Obama.
The right, goaded on by the left, destroys its own. No matter how outlandish the claim against a conservative candidate, people like you will take up the battle cry with the media and the worst of the left to destroy him. To survive as a republican, a candidate must be so tepid as to never threaten leftist conventional wisdom. Pick nearly any republican.
The point of the exercise is that the current welfare state has been a disastrous failure. But you would rather lend your support to that welfare state by attacking anyone who doesn't have a perfect argument against it. You are motivated by your own ego and need to demonstrate how scholarly and objective you are.
Your moral exhibitionism isn't worth a pitcher of warm spit.