Mary C. Curtis: Why Does America Romanticize Slavery?

Mary C. Curtis, an award-winning Charlotte, N.C.-based journalist, is a contributor to The Root, Fox News Charlotte, NPR, Creative Loafing and the Nieman Watchdog blog. She was national correspondent for Politics Daily. Follow her on Twitter. 

...The "statement" that caused such a ruckus is in the preamble to a "marriage vow" signed by GOP presidential hopefuls Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum; it condemns pornography and same-sex marriage but finds a silver lining in slavery. That odious institution may have "had a disastrous impact on African-American families," it reads, "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."

As many of those who have reacted in horror to the statement have said, America did not recognize the marriages of slaves, who were considered property. When, in defiance of that ban, men and women in the most brutal circumstances came together in love and started a family, it could be and was ripped apart on the auction block at their owners' whim and will.

The notion that it was that very violation of every law of human decency that weakened African-American families was not acknowledged by the Family Leader. I will, however, give the group credit (the bad kind) for pointing out, to anyone who had not noticed, that President Barack Obama is African American as it floated the argument that -- in comparison -- he somehow makes slavery look good....