There are only a handful of African Americans running for the U.S. Senate this election year, and only one -- Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) -- currently serves on Capitol Hill.
One candidate hoping to change that is Bishop Keith Butler, a former Detroit city councilman and founding pastor of the nondenominational Word of Faith International Christian Center Church, which he claims has a 22,000-member congregation.
Ed Gordon talks to Keith Butler about his new book, Reviving the American Spirit: A Strategy of Hope for the 21st Century, and about what Butler sees as some of the biggest challenges facing black Americans in the 21st century: high taxes, illegal immigration and education, and especially abortion.
"We're aborting children at an alarming rate," Butler says, saying U.S. blacks are "the number-one abortion folks in the country, as Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood plan to eliminate our race." Some link Sanger, a birth control pioneer, to the discredited eugenics movement that sought to eliminate less "fit" races from the gene pool.
He also links abortion to national economic health, saying that the estimated 45 million abortions since Roe v. Wade represent potential taxpayers who could right now be contributing to the U.S. economy.
Butler may be a Republican, but his congregation -- reportedly the largest in Michigan -- is made up mostly of Democrats. "I'm not into the labels stuff -- there's some in the Republican Party who consider me liberal," he says. "I'm interested in getting things done -- how do we best grow ourselves, and what's in the best interests of black people."
However, he is fighting very long odds to unseat Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a popular first-term legislator.
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