Michele Bachmann's Slavery-Pledge Fracas: UH Gets Drawn In

GOP Presidential superstar Michele Bachmann recently took time out from her constant anti-gay missteps to mess up in a new area: slavery.

She and Rick Santorum have signed a "Family Leader" pledge about social issues that includes an intro that says black children were better off in the slavery era than under the Obama administration.

And where did that info come from? The University of Houston, says the group that wrote it.

Says the Des Moines Register:

An introductory passage of the marriage vow drawn up by the Family Leader claimed that a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father than an African-American born after the election of the country's first black president....

[Family Leader president Bob] Vander Plaats told the Register that some of the information came from a Digital History website supported by the University of Houston. He removed the language from the vow partly because "I wanted to make sure the data is correct," he said.

Coogs represent!!!

Except the Coogs seem to have no idea what Vander Plaats is talking about.

"I checked with the folks with the UH Digital Library, and they could not immediately locate anything that would support the language you reference in the article," UH spokesman Richard Bonnin tells Hair Balls.

"It's important to note, however, that the UH Digital Library puts historical photographs and documents online, but makes no judgments on them and makes no statement about the contents," he says.

So it's possible there's something in there that might have led the Family Group to make the observation about slavery. Why they chose to do it is another matter, but we're sure Bachmann and Santorum will backtrack away as nimbly as they can.