this thing of presidential candidates signing pledges on this and that seems wacky to me. be that as it may, the trad marriage pledge signed by bachmann and santorum said this: "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." i've seen a bunch of talking heads (as also salon, etc) summarizing this passage as saying that african-american families were better off in slavery than they are in freedom. how insanely offensive! but of course that's not what this says exactly.
it's a factual assertion, and your moral repugnance for it is neither here nor there as regards its truth. it might be false. it might be extremely hard actually to evaluate the evidence for it. there might be true things that no one should ever say, though that would be disturbing. there might be some obscurities around important terms - such as 'household' or 'african-american' - which could use some clarification. it might not matter whether it's true or not. but it does not endorse slavery, and the question of whether or not it's true does not depend on your anti-racist, anti-slavery, or anti-marriage-is-between-one-man-and-one-woman opinions.
this is a good example of credibility-index-type problems. through their ideological spectacles, people don't seem even to be able to see what that sentence says - they cannot paraphrase or summarize it accurately - and they do not regard evidence as relevant to its evaluation, though it is a flat factual assertion and only actual statistical evidence bears on its truth.
