{"id":1840,"date":"2004-02-15T05:35:40","date_gmt":"2004-02-15T12:35:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2004\/02\/del-martins-mission\/"},"modified":"2004-02-15T05:35:40","modified_gmt":"2004-02-15T12:35:40","slug":"del-martins-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2004\/02\/15\/del-martins-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"Del Martin’s Mission"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tLots of blogging people have sustained elbow injuries from patting themselves on the back over how inclusive and tolerant they are with respect to gay marriage since the City and County of Frisco has been issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. This exercise generally involves quite a bit of sneering at the religious right<\/a> and is generally most intense on feminist and\/or libertarian blogs such as Look<\/i> Like the Downfall of Western Culture: Comments” href=”http:\/\/www.theagitator.com\/archives\/010364.php#010364″>Radley Balko<\/a> and Reason Magazine<\/a>, and on the sorts of blogs that were in favor of tolerating the marriage of Saddam Hussein with the people of Iraq a few months ago. And yes, I can see that this development is good for many gay people and not at all destructive to normal marriages, but the latter is because we’ve already paid the price for normalizing gay relationships and demonizing straight ones.<\/p>\n

This process started in the US and the UK in the mid-seventies when the movement to provide shelter and support to violence-prone women was hijacked by a group of people who made a conscious decision to tear down the image of the traditional family in order to achieve a set of goals that included gay marriage, a permanent women’s rights movement, and an anti-male emphasis in most aspects of social engineering.
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\nThis is not to say that there’s anything wrong with sheltering and supporting battered women, or that there’s anything right with abusing or neglecting children. But it is to say that there’s something wrong with hijacking these issues and using them to beat up on straight men and women instead of genuinely and honestly trying to alleviate the suffering of the nominal victims.<\/p>\n

One of the harshest critics of the hijacking of the family violence issue is Erin Pizzey<\/a>, the founder of the oldest shelter for battered women in the world, Chiswick Women’s Aid. Pizzey notes that the anti-male emphasis in family violence advocacy prevents violence-prone women from getting the kind of help that will prevent them from cycling though violent relationships with a series of different partners.<\/p>\n

The tactic that was used by the hijackers was to spin the dynamics of family violence through a series of myths, distortions and outright lies, many of which were documented by Christina Hoff Summers in Who Stole Feminism<\/i> such as the Rule of Thumb myth<\/a>. According to this delusion, English Common Law permitted men to beat their wives with a stick as long as it was no fatter than a thumb. Here’s what the National Organization for Women claimed in 1976:<\/p>\n

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Our law, based upon the old English common-law doctrines, explicitly permitted wife-beating for correctional purposes. However, certain restrictions did exist… For instance, the common-law doctrine had been modified to allow the husband “the right to whip his wife, provided that he used a switch no bigger than his thumb” — a rule of thumb, so to speak. — Del Martin, Battered Wives<\/i>, Volcano Press, 1976, p. 31.)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But these are the facts:<\/p>\n

The ‘rule of thumb’ story is an example of revisionist history that feminists happily fell into believing. It reinforces their perspective on society, and they tell it as a way of winning converts to their angry creed… <\/p>\n

The ‘rule of thumb’, however, turns out to be an excellent example of what may be called a feminist fiction. It is not to be found in William Blackstone’s treatise on English common law. On the contrary, British law since the 1700s and our American laws predating the Revolution prohibit wife beating, though there have been periods and places in which the prohibition was only indifferently enforced. <\/p>\n

That the phrase did not even originate in legal practice could have been ascertained by any fact-checker who took the trouble to look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which notes that the term has been used metaphorically for at least three hundred years to refer to any method of measurement or technique of estimation derived from experience rather than science. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See also: DEBUNKING YET ANOTHER FEMINIST MYTH<\/a>, and No clear rule of thumb<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So why make up such a crazy tale? Well, let’s connect some dots. Lesbian relationships are fraught with violence. Claire Renzetti, herself a lesbian and a feminist, estimated in Violent Betrayal<\/a><\/i> that half of lesbian relationships are violent. In straight relationships, violence is extremely rare, occurring in less than 1 percent of marriages (one survey by the Justice Department had it a 2 tenths of a percent). So lesbian rights advocates felt it was supremely important to create the perception that all women lived under a cloud of violence, not just gay women, so they undertook a campaign that de-emphasized the violence that women do to their partners and their children, while grossly inflating the extent of rape, child abuse, and partner abuse done by men. This campaign was been relentless since the mid-seventies, and has produced such gross misperceptions as:<\/p>\n