Anthea Butler Blasts Racist Lies of White Faith-Based Conservatives

Anthea Butler speaks truth to (very corrupt) power, and tells "ahistorical white conservatives, white supremacists, and Quiverfull advocates" to knock off their maundering, totally insincere act of concern for black and brown babies, which is really hysteria disguised as concern.  It's hysteria about the fact that people of color are outpacing white people in producing babies, disguised as concern for the fate of African-American children.

As Butler notes, the Vander Plaats Family Leader pledge that Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum have just signed contained, at the time Bachmman signed it, an astonishing claim that the Family Leader group has now removed from the pledge--because it's an outright lie, and they were taking heat for telling this lie.  This was the claim that black children were better off in 1860, under a slave system that freely broke up slave families for commercial gain, than they are now. 

Butler's response to this lie: 

Um, Hell-to-the-yeah slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families. White slave owners broke apart families to sell, raped black women, and often confiscated the babies from these forced unions. Somehow, conservatives like Bob Vander Plaats forget to mention that. They are too busy buying into the fake history of the forefathers from WallBuilders.

As Butler notes, there's more than a little hypocrisy (not to mention a huge double standard) in how hysterical white conservatives address the phenomenon of out-of-wedlock pregnancy in the case of black mothers, and how they address it when a Bristol Palin bears a child outside marriage (and then profits from her pretend-denunciation of such behavior): 

I am really getting sick and tired of the conservative meme about saving marriage, and placing the shaky foundation of their argument on African-American single parent birth and wedlock rates. Conservatives idolize the founding fathers, yet they conveniently forget the legacy of slavery and its atrocities many of the founders acquiesced to. While conservatives tick off statistics about African-American babies born out of wedlock, Teen Mom is the MTV show where teenage white girls can get their cash on by being pregnant and beating up their boyfriends on TV. Bristol Palin is proof that being a pregnant, unwed white girl is enough for a memoir at 20 called Not Afraid of Life. Put this together with all the reproductive rights rollbacks on abortion and the like, and the schizophrenic hysteria of the right doesn’t hold up.

When it comes to vows, pledges, and the like, the last thing I want to hear it from is a white male conservative authoring some sappy pledge for candidates to sign. After reading the report on John Ensign and Mark Sandford hitting the Appalachian Trail, and the RNC using funds at a sex-themed voyeur nightclub, moralizing, asinine pledges aren’t going to stop anyone, including the candidates, from having sex and watching lots of porn. Add in the ahistoricism of the right, and it’s laughable that any pledge from this hypocritical bunch could hold water.

What Butler has to say here is the gospel truth.   But, unfortunately, it won't make a whit of difference in the thinking of those "faith-based" conservatives who will be impressed by Bachmann's and Santorum's endorsement of the Vander Plaats pledge.  

Because hypocrisy is the name of the game for these conservatives--both in their claim to be motivated by concern for racial minority groups, and in their claim to be all about combating loose living--a claim that constantly looks the other way when yet another member of the religious or political right is caught with his pants down (or his diaper on) in some compromising place.

The graphic is a portion of a page from the 1851 estate sale of an ancestor of mine, Joseph Pryor, in Tuscaloosa Co., Alabama.  Under the heading "Names of Articles" in the middle of the page, one finds a list of names of slaves sold in this estate sale--the slaves of the estate that had not previously been given as deeds of gifts by Joseph Pryor to his children, or willed to family members in his will.