He claimed that was when "families were strong and stayed together".
By which we can only assume he meant white families, because of course black families were routinely torn apart by slave owners selling husbands, wives, and children to different owners.
I know that Roy Moore was being an absolute fucking racist ass hat, and this point is completely moot, but white families weren't more united then either. Maybe in Alabama, but not across the entire south. Regions and families in Tennessee and West Virginia were split between the Union and the Confederacy.
So in short, his myth is bullshit on multiple levels.
Yeah this "families were strong back in the day" is a hilarious little fiction that's used as justification for all kinds of dumbass viewpoints. A co-worker of mine tried to argue that black people in America were better off before civil rights bc there were fewer single parent households and it took me a solid 5 minutes to pick up my jaw off the floor before telling him to shut the fuck up.
I've heard this line a number of times. It's been a thing (some) conservatives say for...awhile. And they do t understand how evil it is/they sound, I guess. It really is disgusting.
Back when the good people of Alabama all had hook worm, stayed home on the farm out of a labor necessity and hanged any random the local vigilante squad could capture? Those good old days?
Why the fuck does anyone try to evoke this crap and what kind of slack-jawed yokel believes it?
Well... See the red counties in this map? Those are the places where the majority of people looked at Roy Moore and said "yes, I want that man to represent me in the US Senate".
I’m pretty sure what he really meant was “Back in the good old days your wife couldn’t leave you no matter what, so you were free to treat her like property. Plus, you could molest however many children you wanted, and if they were black, no one would care!”
He is also blowing a dog whistle. In the white supremacist community there is a meme that black people were better off as skates because as skates at least their family unit was kept together (which isn't even true)
That is a recent (since 70s) trend that conservatives blame on the rise of welfare (mother's are sure there children won't starve) and the drug epidemic (fathers are not around).
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u/sotonohito Texas Dec 13 '17
He claimed that was when "families were strong and stayed together".
By which we can only assume he meant white families, because of course black families were routinely torn apart by slave owners selling husbands, wives, and children to different owners.