Life, Liberty, and… Domestic Violence?

Published 10:19 am Monday, June 20, 2016

By CLAY MERCER

If you go to any seminar on domestic violence these days you will find that the vast, the overwhelming, majority of presenters will focus on one specific situation: the wife as the victim and the husband as the perpetrator.

Technically, we don’t really have to deal in terms of ‘husbands’ and ‘wives’ since any domestic couple can be subject to violence.  Any people who live together can argue and fight and in this day and age the term ‘couples,’ even ‘families,’ can cover a wide range of circumstances.

Still, I attended, and paid attention, in at least one domestic violence seminar each year during my thirteen years of casework at the Dooly County Department of Family and Children Services.  I learned several things.

The first thing I learned was that nobody at the seminar wanted to talk about mom and dad beating up on the children.  Parents in Dooly County, and elsewhere, could get really creative when it came to physically abusing their children, but let’s just stick to beating them up.

No matter.  Try to discuss child abuse at a domestic violence seminar and you get booed off the stage faster than Bernie Sanders at a Black Lives Matter rally.

The same thing was true anytime I pointed out that approximately fifty percent of the ‘domestic violence’ I investigated for DFCS involved a woman causing injury and pain to a man.  They threw everything on ‘em from hot fish oil to large can of ‘whup-ass.’  We can’t discuss that, Mr. Mercer, we’re here to discuss domestic violence.

Eventually I learned to sit in the back, keep my mouth shut, and do something creative like balance my check book.  Guess what I found out?  The women at the seminars wanted it that way.  The only man they wanted to hear talk was the male apologist who would support their arguments that, no matter what, it wasn’t the woman’s fault.

“Oh, they had nowhere to go.”  I have no doubt that was true, in some cases.  “Oh, they had no family support.”  That was probably true, too, in some cases.  “Oh, there was no one they could tell.”  Maybe so.

I know this, though.  If you put a thousand men and a thousand women together, and only one man had the potential to be an abuser, and only one woman had the potential to become a victim, those two people would find each other.

One other point I’d like to make about domestic violence is that, in almost all the cases I worked, somewhere in the mixture was a person who was an enabler.  They knew about the violence and pretended it didn’t happen.

Sometimes that enabler was the victim.  They chose to believe their violent spouse was really telling the truth when they said things like, “It’ll never happen again,” and “You know that’s not who I am.”

Never mind what their true actions were, never mind the shouting and tension and unrest that built up before the next episode of violence, the enabler was always there to make excuses and show that the abuser was really a nice person.

That’s what we have come to as a Nation, friends and neighbors.  America is a country of victims.  Democrats love victims because it creates more people they can ‘save.’  The problem is, the Democrats in America aren’t the saviors, they’re the enablers.

Well, then, if Democrats are the enablers, and Americans are the victims, who then are the abusers?  Who is committing the violence?  Go ahead, keep asking yourself that question.