Bachmann & Santorum invoke "slavery"

[RyanPsych]

WASHINGTON - How much slack are voters likely to cut Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum for signing a racist, gay-bashing "family values" pledge as they pandered to the bigots in their campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination?

Bachmann and Santorum backpedaled furiously when the media exposed a clause in the pledge proclaiming "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 U.S.A.'s first African American President."

Incredibly, that clause ignored one of the most genocidal practices in chattel slavery, the systematic selling of mothers, fathers, and the children on the auction bloc, a form of legalized abduction that smashed families - often forever. The practice was so atrocious that in some states, after the abolition of the African slave trade, "slave breeding" became a hugely profitable, if loathsome, enterprise.

Harriet Beecher Stowe immortalized slave mothers' fightback in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," depicting Eliza fleeing across the ice floes of the Ohio River with her child who was slated to be snatched from her and sold down the river.Equally racist is the pledge's attempt to pin blame on President Obama for the devastating economic crisis of mass unemployment and poverty inflicted on African American families by 35 years of "first fired, last hired" discrimination in the "trickle-down" economics initiated and implemented mainly by the Republican right.

continue at: http://www.peoplesworld.org/bachmann-and-santorum-spark-furor-over-slavery-family-values/

[CartoonDiablo]

1. Slavery is a conservative notion

It is a curious phenomenon of our own day and nation that all opinions favorable to Slavery should be regarded as "conservative" and "practical," while those opposed to it should be stigmatized as the "utopian".

- New York Times, "The Irrepressible Conflict.", 1860