To me, this is outrageous for a public figure. A ten second google search would show that the Rule of Thumb was never, ever, ever used in this manner and his statement is demonstrably false.
Further, the law did not treat women as the equivalent of cattle or other chattel property. Certainly steps needs to be taken for full equality, but women were never “considered to be chattel” under English law.
Also, I have serious reservations that husbands beating their wives to death was ever a common thing in 14th Century England.
Does anyone want to try to make any sense of or defend these remarks?
It’s an idiotic and historically illiterate statement. No argument here.
I’m sure many thirteenth century men did get away with beating their wives to death, just as I’m sure a lot got away with beating their children, servants and neighbors to death. I’m not aware of it ever being codified into law, and of course the rule of thumb thing is a well-known piece of bullshit.
For “legal right to kill family members”, you want Ancient Rome
You mean got away with as in the crime was not found out? I agree with that. But if you mean got away with in the sense that if it was discovered and reported that a judge might say, “Well, that was his wife so he is privileged to kill her”? If the latter, then I very much disagree.
Even at the time of Blackstone, he stated that there was an “ancient law” that permitted a man to discipline his wife much like he could (and still today can) discipline a child, but Blackstone noted that today (in his time) such a privilege was no longer applicable.
I would be interested in seeing just a single case where a man was acquitted or not prosecuted because of some privilege to beat his wife so severely even if it caused her death. I have no reason to think that he wouldn’t be prosecuted with murder.
And that puts aside Biden’s assertion that is was so very common that judges had to get together and invent a rule of only modest beatings to prevent “so many wives … being beaten to death by their husbands.”
Domestic violence is a serious concern, but it is utterly irresponsible to suggest that it has been part of our culture for hundreds of years. The concern is not that polite society allowed it, indeed that was never the mark of a good or proper husband, but that society for years had a “well it can’t be that bad or else she would leave him” attitude that vastly oversimplified the problem and did not get to the root of the problem.
It is very dangerous, especially given that he should know better, as it militarizes groups against society on a falsehood.
Wait, what’s the complaint here? That Biden repeated a myth as fact that, for most of his life, had been widely accepted as fact? That he wasn’t up to date on the debunking of that myth?
Or that it would somehow make a difference in how a Biden Presidency handled issues relating to violence against and abuse of women?
If the former - well, I’m not exactly one of Biden’s biggest defenders on this board (quite the opposite!), but oh dearle me. :fans self, clutches pearls: Can we criticize Biden over something that actually matters? Plenty of that to go around.
If the latter, then maybe you’re on better ground, but you gotta make the connection for me. I’m not seeing it.
FWIW, the gripe against Snopes in post #2 is bullshit. The purpose of the cited Snopes post was to debunk something entirely different - the edited tape that purportedly showed that Biden was a white nationalist. So yes, it mentioned only in passing the mythical nature of “rule of thumb” and left it at that, because it wasn’t the focus of the piece, not to “let him off the hook.” Seriously, dude.
1). Biden was obviously wrong about the rule of thumb. It was a dumb thing to say and he shouldn’t have said it.
2). It’s not a big deal. Especially since Trump says dumber stuff every day.
3). It’s not “outrageous”, and I think it’s ridiculous that the OP finds it so.
4). It’s a distraction from his repugnant “Learn to code” comment from the other day. That really was outrageous. It was a heartless, stupid, DNC gig economy talking point. Middle aged miners don’t want to ‘learn to code’, and even if they did no employer is going to hire them over a 20 year old with the same skills. Either Joe doesn’t know that, or he does know it but doesn’t care. Both are unforgivable and * that’s* what we should be talking about.
It is not simply the “Rule of Thumb” misquote. It is bad enough that he cannot check a claim that has been debunked for twenty-five years.
My problem is his whole spiel. That our culture allowed untold amounts of spousal murder and the response of judges was to introduce a rule that you could only beat your wife a little but not a lot with the implication that this heritage has stayed with us today and why fighting domestic abuse is so hard.
That’s simply an absolute lie. It has not been acceptable in our society for at least 300 years even to lay a hand on your wife. No decent person beats their wife.
The problem is that for too many years people did not understand the dynamic of abuse and underestimated the ability of an abused woman to leave a relationship. Let’s fix the problem starting with that understanding, not with the idea that men have to mentally fight every day to keep from murdering women.
I don’t agree with the talking point that Dems hate America, but this is fodder. It is a mainstream presidential candidate simply lying in an attempt to show how utterly evil our culture is.
It is not about being stupid or idiotic. It is actively misleading and dangerous.
I agree that the “learn to code” was insulting, but at least it wasn’t prefaced with a wholly false narrative. When/if Trump says something similar, I’ll post in that thread.
No, I mean as in people getting mad and beating other people up was a normal part of life, sometimes these people died, and sometimes that person might be your wife, child, neighbor, or whoever. There wasn’t even a distinct crime of murder as we’d understand it until the twelfth century, and there weren’t any police - bringing a felon to justice was the job of the neighbors. The usual penalty for a lot of what we’d call murder was a fine (to the victim’s kin) and ‘I was just trying to beat them up, not kill them’ was a totally legally acceptable argument (and, again - fine paid to the kin. If YOU were the kin, then I guess no penalty)
‘Yes you could get away with killing your wife’ was true in the sense of ‘yes, you could get away in general with killing people a lot more easily than is easy to imagine for a modern person’
The English legal code before Henry II didn’t distinguish between murder=intentional killing and manslaughter=unintentional. It distinguished between slaying openly and slaying covertly, and the first one was a fining offence, not a hanging offence. So you could walk up to your enemy, stab him in the guts, pay compensation to his family, and be square. If you put arsenic in his beer though, then you were in trouble. This is before the period that the OP quote is trying to talk about, but not much before.
Did you mean to say that people overestimated the ability of an abused woman to leave a relationship? I mean, it can be really difficult to for an abused woman to leave a relationship, right? It’s a great way to get herself killed.
Anyway, this article says that, prior to 1970 in the US, domestic violence (short of murder, I’m sure) was treated pretty hands-off by the police:
This seems to be in contrast with the main thrust of your complaint with Biden. He was factually wrong about the rule of thumb thing, but he’s right that society mostly didn’t take spousal abuse seriously until the '70s. Can we agree that this was the main point of his historically dubious tale?
I don’t buy this uncited claim. In my reading, abuse of women has been largely tolerated (and even sometimes encouraged!) for most of history up into recent times.
In 1964, the Dick Van Dyke show featured an episode (The Lady and the Tiger and the Lawyer) in which Dick sets up Sally with a bachelor neighbor, which Laura sets up that same neighbor with an unmarried cousin of hers. The bachelor dates both women, the dates apparently go well, but he never calls them back. Why? He beats up people he loves (he feels terrible about it!) so his therapist advises him to never date a woman more than once. Obviously not definitely evidence, but an indication of what societal norms were.
What a pile of bullcrap. Yes, the ‘rule of thumb’ bit is false, but the underlying point - that our society has a very long history of condoning spousal abuse - is absofuckinglutely true. There’s nothing counterproductive about making that point, and the use of the ‘rule of thumb’ myth is a minor cavil.
OTOH, “It has not been acceptable in our society for at least 300 years even to lay a hand on your wife” is also a myth, and a pernicious one.
One example: if you’re old enough to remember the reaction to the Rolling Stones’ “Black and Blue” billboard in 1976, you may also remember that a lot of people, obviously including record company execs, were caught off guard by women’s anger at the billboard. They didn’t see what was wrong with selling an album by portraying a woman who’d been tied up and beaten as sexy.
If it had been unacceptable in our society in 1976 and the years leading up to it for a man to lay a hand on his wife, this ad would never have been made in the first place, and if it had, the outrage would have come from all quarters. But that was not how it was.
You can’t focus on his failure to research an urban legend. The point I believe he was trying to make is that abuse of women is a long standing cultural problem. I think that part is sound. But instead of talking about the larger issue, now it’s “hee hee hee, we gotcha!” attack on Biden. Oh yes, by all means rake him over the coals for repeating a myth and use that to put him at the same level as a serial adulterer and confessed sexual predator.
Is it a symptom of a big deal? I don’t want a President who accepts, passes along, and acts on everything he hears or thinks he knows without checking up on it to see if it’s really true,
You’re kidding, right?