 [NEWS.GRABIEN] ormer vice president and likely 2020 presidential candidate, Joe Biden, attacked the United States’ “white man’s culture,” during an appearance at the Biden Courage Awards, which honors those working to combat sexual assault on college campuses.
Actually, white man's culture sez sexual assault is a big no-no. You know, chivalry and all that sort of nonsense. Non-white cultures have mostly treated women as property. Some, like Hindoo culture, had pleasant practices like suttee, where the woman was expected to climb onto her husband's funeral pyre.
| That’s because the way the conquering Moghuls treated Hindoo widows was much worse than merely burning to death. Sometimes all the choices are bad. |
Biden said America’s racist culture is why Anita Hill wasn’t able to stop Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court.
Could it have been possible that she was a liar?
“A really notable woman, Anita Hill, professor, showed the courage of a lifetime talking about her experience being harassed by Clarence Thomas,” Biden said at the New York City banquet. “We knew a lot less about the extent of harassment back then, over 30 years ago. But she paid a terrible price. She was abused through the hearing. She was taken advantage of. Her reputation was attacked.”
They tried to do the same thing with Justice Kavanaugh, possibly the cleanest man in the U.S.A. And Clarence Thomas remains a really notable man, who’s been paying a terrible price, living with hearsay as evidence against his reputation.
“I wish I could have done something,” he continued. “I opposed Clarence Thomas nomination. I voted against him. But I also realized there was a real and perceived problem the committee faced.”
Joe's got a real and perceived problem with putting his hands on every woman in sight. Maybe he's just hard of seeing and he's acquainting himself by braille.
Biden squarely blamed white people for Clarence Thomas being believed over Anita Hill.
"Dat's what white people do!"... But wait! Joe's white. Wouldn't he do the same thing? I'm so confused.
“They were a bunch of white guys,” he said. “No, I mean it sincerely, a bunch of white guys hearing this testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee. So when Anita Hill, when Anita Hill came to testify, she faced a committee that didn’t fully understand what the hell is all about. To this day I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to get a kind of hearing she deserved, given the courage she showed by reaching out to us. The hearing she deserved was a hearing where she was respected, where the tone and the questioning was not hostile and as sullied, where the fact that she stepped forward was recognized as an act of courage in and of itself. Because let’s face it, back in 1991 it took a lot of courage to take on a man who was so much a part of the establishment and the power structure.”
He was a powerful black man, y'see. They're just the same as white men, only they're black. Joe's got his pander up, by gum!
Biden traced the episode back to English common law in the 1300s, which he said enabled spousal abuse.
In India, they were much more enlightened. Under the Laws of Manu, the primary pre-colonial Indian jurisprudence (other than the Koran), the only apparent time that a woman obtains any real power is when she becomes the senior married woman in a household. Even this status has its limits. According to the Manusmrti the wife must still obey her male relatives, which in this case would mean chiefly her husband. So what would woman do when her husband died? If a Hindu woman was lucky she would have other male relatives who would care for her, in particular her sons.
“You all know what the phrase rule of thumb means? Where it’s derived from?” Biden asked. “In English common law, not codification or common law, back in the late 1300s, so many women were dying at the hands of her husbands because they were chattel, just like the cattle or the sheep, that the Court of Common Law decided they had to do something about the extent of the deaths. So, you know what they said? No man has a right to chastise his woman with a rod thicker than the circumference of his thumb. This is English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. That’s got to change it’s got to change.”
That's what we call a "folk etymology." Blackstone makes no mention of the "rule of thumb," and the way it's used doesn't appear to go with the supposed definition.The exact phrase rule of thumb first became associated with domestic abuse in the 1970s, after which the spurious legal definition was cited as factual in a number of law journals. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published a report on domestic abuse titled "Under the Rule of Thumb" in 1982. Maybe they were just thinking about the numerous fatwahs allowing wife beating as long as the stick is no bigger than an inch around. 
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