{"id":2181,"date":"2011-07-12T13:28:45","date_gmt":"2011-07-12T20:28:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2181"},"modified":"2011-07-12T13:28:45","modified_gmt":"2011-07-12T20:28:45","slug":"the-marriage-vow-and-african-american-families","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2011\/07\/12\/the-marriage-vow-and-african-american-families\/","title":{"rendered":"The "Marriage Vow" and African American Families"},"content":{"rendered":"

On today’s Brian Lehrer Show<\/a> there was a segment on a “Marriage Vow<\/a>” being promoted by a religious right group called the The Family Leader<\/a>.\u00a0 The original version of the Vow, as signed by Tea Party \/ Religious Right darling Michele Bachman<\/a> (among others), stated the following:<\/p>\n

“a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father\u00a0in a two-parent household than an African-American baby born after the election of the\u00a0USA\u2019s first African-American President.”<\/em><\/p>\n

After some public outcry, this clause apparently was dropped from the Vow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are so many ways in which this clause is stupid and uninformed.\u00a0\u00a0Let me focus on one:\u00a0 the notion that a child born into slavery in 1860 was part of a “household.”\u00a0 African American slaves were not permitted to run their own “households.”\u00a0 In fact,\u00a0in many states\u00a0slaves were not legally permitted to marry.\u00a0 Even where marriages were permitted, slaves remained the property of their owners, who could separate families at will.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The\u00a0truth is that no<\/em> black child born into slavery in 1860 was raised in a “two-parent household.”\u00a0 All<\/em> such children were were raised in multi-person\u00a0work-camp-prison compounds\u00a0headed dictatorially by a white male, who owned them as his property.\u00a0 (Rather ironically, but sadly not surprisingly, The Family Leader touts itself as a purveyor<\/a> of Focus on the Family’s “Truth Project<\/a>.”)<\/p>\n

Does this suggest the authors of the original version of this Vow are racist?\u00a0 Well, yes.\u00a0 Here we get a glimpse behind the racial code-word curtain of American libertarian Tea Party politics.\u00a0 Why anyone claiming to be a follower of Jesus would align him or herself with this sort of thing is beyond me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On today’s Brian Lehrer Show there was a segment on a “Marriage Vow” being promoted by a religious right group called the The Family Leader.\u00a0 The original version of the Vow, as signed by Tea Party \/ Religious Right darling Michele Bachman (among others), stated the following: “a child born into slavery in 1860 was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-zb","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}