In my last post, I talked about an NBC article that discussed how Republicans pounced (eye roll) on Joe Biden’s mistreatment of her granddaughter. I won’t even name the young girl, because last I checked she is not even old enough for kindergarten. In the last few years, I have learned that many students literally google the names of other students to see if they can learn anything about them. Maybe someone else has named her publicly and that will eventually cause the child embarrassment, but it won’t come from me. Because as I just said, ‘[s]he’s frankly the innocent victim in all of this.’
And in the process of writing that post, I discovered that Ann Coulter had weighed in on the controversy. NBC even seemed gleeful to bring her up in defense of Joe Biden and upon reading it, yes, my reaction was truly ‘Good Lord!’ because her reasoning is so terrible. Mind you, I don’t constantly hate on Coulter. A lot of what she says is right, or at least interesting, but this time she is way off.
And just as a warning, dear reader, the language gets a little salty, because Ann Coulter. And honestly, that is admittedly the fun part.
So first, the column:
Hunter's 'Love Child' and Conservative Madness https://t.co/JD6vDDTY4g
— George Kovacs (@gfkovacs50) July 13, 2023
Let’s dig in. First, she says:
Right-wingers (and The New York Times' Maureen Dowd) are browbeating President Biden for not embracing his son Hunter's illegitimate child -- the result of drug-crazed, unprotected sex with a stripper.
Conservatives are so enjoying bashing the president that they're taking a strikingly unconservative position. We don't believe in polyamorous three-person ‘families’ or ‘Heather Has Two Mommies’ or ‘Junior, meet your half-brother from Daddy's unprotected sex outside of marriage!’
We're the ones who believe that marriage means something. (Thus, our opposition to gay marriage.) Ideally, a man wouldn't have any ‘parental rights’ to a kid he fathered unless he's married to the mother, and she wouldn't get access to the sperm-donor's bank account unless she's married to him.
Let me pause here for a moment and point out that the mother, Lunden Roberts, is actually reported to be an ex-stripper. She was a stripper at the time she was with Hunter Biden, but reportedly isn’t now.
Hunter Biden's daughter with ex-stripper will receive some of his paintings, but not his last name: settlement https://t.co/e5zRkYVQB0 #FoxNews
— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) June 29, 2023
She goes on to lament that the law allows unwed fathers to have parental rights over their children as well as child support obligations, which the courts have already dealt with in this case, but then returns to the moral question of how the granddaughter should be treated:
What are conservatives and Dowd imagining exactly? That the stripper -- accompanying the 4-year-old child -- should be invited to Biden family dinners, weddings and vacations? How will this be explained to the other grandchildren? Uncle Hunter smoked crack cocaine then ejaculated inside a woman who takes her clothes off for a living. Be polite and ask her how she enjoys her work!
Just because Hunter is a total degenerate doesn't mean society should allow unfit mothers to use their capture of his sperm as a winning lottery ticket, entitling her entree into someone else's family.
The silly thing about this argument is that Joe Biden can acknowledge his granddaughter without being even slightly kind to her mother. For starters, the next time he talks about how many grandchildren he has, how about saying ‘seven’ instead of ‘six?’
I was willing to give Joe Biden some leeway on this back when there might have been a dispute about paternity, but we are well past that.
And in my day job I am a lawyer who deals with many different kinds of cases, including family law. So, I know how ridiculous it is for Coulter to imagine that this means that they have to invite the child’s mother to family weddings and the like. In the vast majority of ordinary cases, fathers often have visitation with their children with minimal contact with the mother. Typically, you meet at a neutral, public location. I am pretty sure that at least 5% of McDonald’s business is parents eating while waiting to make the exchange and/or treating their child to MickeyD’s during or after the swap. When parents don’t get along, the local police department parking lot is another popular choice. There’s little reason why visitation between grandparents and the granddaughter has to involve more contact than that. The law is well aware of the fact that sometimes people joined in this manner don’t particularly like each other.
Hunter seems to have little interest in his daughter, and his entirely personal conduct is not relevant to me by the principles I mentioned in our last piece. For instance, his cocaine use is relevant because it breaks federal law, raising the question of whether his father is giving him special treatment—not to mention the possibility that it was his cocaine that caused the White House to be briefly evacuated. If Hunter is a terrible father, however, I don’t think that is a direct reflection on Joe Biden’s character. We know of a number of good, moral conservatives (famous or otherwise) who had wayward children.
But right now, Joe Biden is being a terrible grandfather. And being a good one doesn’t take very much effort. Just to give a little perspective, I grew up in a classic nuclear family, with parents who stayed together and with good relations with all four of my grandparents, who have all since passed on. But even then, with everyone getting along, typically I only saw my grandparents once a year. So why not next time there is an easter egg hunt at the White House, Ms. Roberts drops off her child and Joe and Jill Biden take that as a moment to give that little girl the love (and candy) she deserves.
I mean, Joe Biden usually isn’t one to pass up a chance to get affectionate with a child, after all.
What is wrong with these people dangling their child in front of the sniffing creep. @JoeBiden pic.twitter.com/jQ1Hiyl4e8
— Bruce Snyder MindfixTV NEWS (@realBruceSnyder) July 14, 2023
And yes, maybe that means Joe Biden shouldn’t be left alone with the child, but that’s actually pretty common in visitation situations, too. Perhaps the Secret Service would be an acceptable third party to keep an eye on things? We'd let Ms. Roberts be the judge of that.
Coulter cites William Blackstone (an authoritative source on English law before the American revolution) to talk about how badly the law used to treat children born out of wedlock, but we have in fact thoroughly repudiated a lot of old laws when we saw them as unjust and we have long believed that it is unjust to harm someone based on something they can’t control. To give a simple example, Blackstone accurately says that the ‘corruption of the blood’ is a consequence of treason. That was a doctrine under which the family of a traitor could be punished for treason that they had no involvement in. By comparison, when it comes to treason, the Constitution says this:
[N]o Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
We all know when the founders thought of treason, one name was definitely on their minds: Benedict Arnold. But even in their lingering hatred at Arnold, they recognized that collective punishment (in this case, guilt-by-association) was wrong. And one can say that the Thirteenth Amendment is, in part, a rejection of collective punishment, too. Some advocates for slavery claimed that black people were meant to be slaves because they were supposedly the descendants of Moses' son, Ham. By abolishing slavery (and mandating equality before the law in the Fourteenth Amendment), we rejected that claim as well as the claim that black people should be punished for something they can’t control—namely, their skin color.
Coulter goes on to admit that the child is blameless and that she doesn't care:
It doesn't matter that ‘it's not the kid's fault.’ Of course it isn't. This is like the anchor baby argument. We're supposed to ignore our borders because IT'S NOT THE CHILD'S FAULT! And now we're supposed to ignore the purpose of marriage because IT'S NOT THE CHILD'S FAULT! We don't take a sledgehammer to the basic building blocks of civilization to avoid somebody, somewhere, having hurt feelings.
But the answer the problem of children born out of wedlock and the problem of anchor babies is to deal with the conduct of the parents, not to punish the children. You can’t throw an anchor baby out of the country—it is literally unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment—and you shouldn’t punish a child for being born out of wedlock. So, with anchor babies, the answer is to actually get control of the border. If the illegal immigrant mother can’t come into America in the first place, the anchor baby problem is solved. And if we as a society want to punish someone for having children out of wedlock, then punish the parents. But harming the child shouldn’t be the last resort: It shouldn’t be up for consideration at all.
Indeed, what Coulter is saying is Hunter Biden should be allowed to come to family vacations and weddings, but not Ms. Roberts or her daughter. Even if Ms. Roberts was still a stripper, that’s nothing compared to all the things Hunter Biden is. So, what is the argument for treating her and her daughter as an exile? Oh, right, she got pregnant with a degenerate like Hunter Biden. And why shouldn’t Hunter be treated worse? Because he is blood to the Bidens. Oh, except so is Hunter’s daughter … so why are we harming her again? Why is the Biden blood sufficient absolution for Hunter’s sin of knocking up a woman out of wedlock (among many, many other sins), but not sufficient to absolve his daughter of the ‘sin’ of being the result of that union?
In fact, Ann Coulter suggests Roberts should have used a diaphragm, but never dings Hunter Biden for failing to use a condom. According to sources I have read, both are roughly equally successful in preventing conception and condoms are more successful in preventing HIV and other STIs. And you know what is more likely to prevent pregnancy than a diaphragm or a condom? Using both.
Of course, all of this reminds me of something I have said for a while. Most, if not all, American jurisdictions keep family law cases private, at least in their lowest courts. Like here in Virginia, they keep all case names to their initials, the public is not allowed to sit in as a rule or view court records. And I understand why they do that. Family law cases air out a lot of dirty laundry even when things are limited to what is true. And the false allegations can be even more embarrassing.
But I do believe that if people understood how much misery you could face in family court, you would work harder to stay out of it. That one-night stand? If pregnancy follows, then you are going to have some involvement with that other person for around 18 years, whether you like it or not. It might be nothing more than child support. It might be meeting up with them at McDonald’s every other weekend for visitation. But you will be involved and you might discover you don’t like that person very much, because after all, you only knew them that one night. You might discover that lover is a very bad person and regret having ever met him or her.
And even divorce is a hellscape. In my experience there is no such thing as an amicable divorce. What they call an amicable divorce is, at best, a lot of screaming and fighting and then finally agreeing to a divorce—and that’s the best-case scenario. I won’t say divorce is always wrong. I have worked with women who were horribly abused by their husband and, in those cases, divorce is a positive good. And there are other situations I have seen where, as miserable as a divorce can be, it beat the alternative. But I would tell all of you to be very reluctant to go down that path, because it is a very miserable road to go down. Don’t you dare think otherwise.
And maybe if people could see that in our family courts, if they could learn how miserable people can make each other after the breakup maybe they would be more careful who they sleep with if they aren’t married, and maybe work harder to stay married if they are.
And I’m writing all of this, I suddenly remembered something that’s a little funny. As a personal note, I am writing this on the nineteenth anniversary of my marriage. Some of you know my wife, but I won’t name her because I keep her as much as possible out of my online life. Nineteen years hasn’t always been easy, but it is also wonderful to have a partner in all things, a person who is always on your side, someone to take care of you when you need it, and someone to take care of when she needs it. I love her, and hope spend the rest of my life with her.
