I can see why too.
Here are the first two bullet points which are designed to make the case for the pledge that Michele Bachman and Rick Santorum signed (Pawlenty, please, step away from the pledge):
Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, 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.
LBJ? 1965 War on Poverty was triggered in part by the famous “Moynihan Report” finding that the black out-of-wedlock birthrate had hit 26%; today, the white rate exceeds that, the overall rate is 41%, and over 70% of African-American babies are born to single parents – a prime sociological indicator for poverty, pathology and prison regardless of race or ethnicity.
The first bullet point is causing all kinds of trouble for the pledge, as it should. What is with the word, “yet?” Do you really want to compare days when masters physically and sexually degraded parents of children; when masters owned families and separated children from them, two parents or not, to now? Any point that might be made about the advantages of two parent families is lost. I’ll take the single-parent version now if my alternative is the two-parent type under slavery.
I am aware that the writers of the pledge probably meant that both slavery and the decline of the two-parent home are bad. However, the juxtaposition is insensitive and misleading to the max.
There are other problems with the pledge, namely the clause which insinuates sexual orientation is a choice and changeable. Overall, this is the kind of thing that should be ignored by any candidate who wants to appeal to the rest of the country and GOP, outside of a small group in Iowa.