By now you’ve heard of Adrian Peterson, the professional footballer charged with child abuse. The case has ignited a national debate about spanking and what “counts” as abuse. The takeaway: Americans love to hit children.
The most common defense is: “My mom and/or dad beat my ass, and I turned out fine.” To which I say, “Uh, you turned into a full-grown adult who hits children. But, hey, we all have our own definitions of ‘fine,’ I guess.”
I find it hard to excuse a man who’s over 6-feet tall and almost 220 pounds whipping a 4-year-old boy with a tree branch until said boy has cuts all over his body, including his testicles. But a lot of people are coming to Peterson’s defense, saying he has the right to discipline his child and that it isn’t anybody else’s business.
One of those people is Sean Hannity of Fox News shame. Kind of. During Hannity’s Sept. 16 radio show, he said, “I do believe Adrian Peterson went too far.”
That said, Hannity is awfully worried that enforcing laws against child abuse will lead to banning the teaching of conservative so-called values.
“This is my problem with liberals,” he says. “Because here’s where my fear goes with all of this. You guys want to tell parents what they can and cannot do. For example, is it going to become illegal if a parent teaches the politically correct view that being gay is not normal?”
Unless you’re a paranoid conservative who believes big guv’ment is coming to get your guns and your god and your freedom, this might seem like an illogical argument. But Hannity has no need for logic. Which is how Hannity manages to simultaneously argue that Peterson “went too far” and that parents have the right to discipline their children as they see fit. And also to tell them terrible things about the gays.
I’d also like to point out that I don’t think Hannity knows what “politically correct” means. Because it is not the “politically correct view” that gays are abnormal. At this point in time, that would probably be the politically incorrect view.
He goes on to say, “I think we’ve gotten to the point where, if we don’t politically correct our kids, we might as well just hand our kids over to the government the day they’re born and let them raise them.”
In this instance, he is using “politically correct” as a euphemism for discipline, maybe? But one thing is for sure, if Americans can’t slap their kids around, then the terrorists have won.
Hannity’s co-host, Noelle Nikpour, keeps intoning that Peterson has the right to discipline his child. And then she calls busting him for child abuse “a gateway offense.”
“Meaning, how far do you want government in your life?” she asks. “There’s a difference in discipline and abuse.”
Well, no shit. But if it’s already been established that Peterson “went too far,” isn’t Nikpour then defending child abuse? This woman is an idiot.
But Hannity really isn’t interested in talking about the whole abuse thing. “My problem here is, do parents have the right to instill their values in their children? The problem is we send these kids off to school and maybe they’re taught … values that contradict whatever the parents are teaching, whatever it happens to be. You know, ‘Heather Has Two Mommies,’ ‘daddy’s roommates,’ that’s the government circumventing parental values.”
It’s a ridiculous, and homophobic, argument. In Hannity’s world, abusers aren’t the enemy, gays are.
Parents have the right to teach their children whatever stupid shit they want under the guise of “values.” But adults don’t have the right to beat the shit out of kids. And it’s unconscionable that we are debating this in what we claim is a civilized society.
Then again, Hannity has never been wild about people who need help from the government. And that extends to children.
D’Anne Witkowski has been gay for pay since 2003. She’s a freelance writer and poet (believe it!). When she’s not taking on the creeps of the world, she reviews rock and roll shows in Detroit with her twin sister and teaches writing at the University of Michigan.