We really get everything laid on us, don’t we?
Officers from the Peru, Ind., police department had made an unsolicited visit to the Hammon couple (presumably after a call from a neighbor). Finding that the Hammons’ argument had ended, but broken glass and a broken gas heater in the house, the policeman asked both husband and wife what happened. Each said the argument was over and everything was fine.
Unwilling to accept the couple’s own resolution of the dispute, a policeman interrogated the Amy Hammon separately to get her side of the argument. This time, she informed the officer that she and her husband had indeed had an argument. Unlike her husband, Amy Hammon claimed it was violent – culminating with Hershel Hammon shoving her head into a gas heater, breaking its glass, and punching her in the chest. At the officer’s request, the wife completed a battery affidavit conveying these allegations.
The wife did not press charges and never showed up in court. Undeterred, without ever putting the wife on the witness stand, the prosecutor obtained a battery conviction of the husband based on the signed legal paper.
Hershel Hammon received a one-year prison sentence, for which he spent 20 days in jail. His home was ruined and, with this serious conviction on his record, his ability to support his family was substantially diminished.
Poor Hershel Hammon. The feminists ruined his home! It wasn’t, you know, smashing his wife’s face into a gas heater that diminished his ability to care for his family. It was the selfish, self-serving women who worked really hard to make that type of behavior illegal. In the good old days, he would have been able to do whatever he pleased with his property.
I love this argument, I really do — especially when it comes from “personal responsibility” conservatives. We can’t hold Mr. Hammon accountable for the consequences that come from beating up his wife. We can’t even blame the prosecutor, who’s the one trying to put him in jail. We have to fault feminists for … well, not for doing anything specifically in this case, but for their agenda.
States have also passed laws that require prosecution even if the woman does not want to prosecute or testify. Unwanted and unnecessary arrests and prosecutions obviously prevent reconciliation and private resolution of family disputes.
Because beating the shit out of your partner — shoving her head into a gas heater, punching her — is a “private issue.” Now, if you had done this to a stranger, we would all agree that it’s quite a public issue, because as part of our commonly understood rights and duties to each other, we don’t do violence to other people, at least under most circumstances. Basic social contract. If Mr. Hammon had walked up to Phyllis on the street and punched her twice in the chest, I really don’t think we’d be hearing her say that it’s a private matter. But because it happened in the home, and because it happened to his wife, Schlafley will justify it.
I bring up the home and the fact that it’s his wife because we do regulate violence in the home, with relatively little conservative hemming and hawing. Abusive parents have (or can have) their children taken away. Now, there are certainly some conservatives who complain about this too, but not nearly as many as complain about laws against spousal/partner abuse. My point isn’t the infer that women should be treated like children — they shouldn’t — but simply to point out that the idea of violence in the home being private and therefore unregulatable is something that we have a fairly universal agreement on (as in, we don’t agree with that premise).
Now, I’m not going to get into the details of the 9-1-1 case that Schlafly has taken on here, because I’ve done it before and I’m still mulling it over. But her positioning of domestic violence as a “private” issue and her claims that feminists ruined this man’s life are quite telling, and worth noting.