Who is the worse father: Hunter Biden or Henry VIII?
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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For the most part, Hunter Biden is no different from any other scummy, satyriasic, drug- and woman-abusing scion of wealthy, white, nouveau riche privilege. Like most social-climbing cads too lazy or strung out to use a condom, the president’s son is taking the mother of his 4-year-old daughter to court to lower child support payments.
But in one crucial respect, the first son is crueler than the average deadbeat father. The president’s son, who has made an entire career of coasting on his last name, now wants to rob his daughter of the “Biden” moniker.
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Biden’s belief that his name bears such importance was enough for him to start a court case over the matter. This stands as an even greater insult to Navy Joan Roberts, the daughter he has reportedly never seen and whom the Biden family has never acknowledged. Worse than a monarch from the Dark Ages, Biden evidently believes that being born out of wedlock truly makes Navy Joan illegitimate in every sense of the word.
Centuries prior to the sexual revolution, a child’s “legitimacy” or lack thereof was critical under the law. Under the Medieval English law that formed the basis of American common law, bastards (as they were so kindly called) were legally barred from inheriting their fathers’ properties, titles, and other honors. Bastardy was considered such a damning legal status that Queens Mary I and Elizabeth I were nearly barred from ascending to their thrones because their father, Henry VIII, had annulled his marriages to their mothers, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, respectively.
All of this brings us to a question of history: Judged by objective measures (not by the standards of their own times), who was the worse father? The terribly unwoke, illiberal absolute monarch known as Henry VIII or Hunter Biden?
Although Henry VIII potentially had to delegitimize his two daughters in order to discard his first two wives, the king defied historical precedent in having his daughters (Mary and then Elizabeth) succeed his one legitimate son if he passed without heirs. (This is what ended up happening, although senior nobles tried and dreadfully failed to make a cousin of Elizabeth and Mary supersede the two princesses.)
Henry VIII did have one child out of wedlock. Yet unlike Biden, he was not ungenerous. He gifted the child a royal last name, “Fitzroy,” and multiple royal titles, including the Dukedom of Richmond that had famously been held by Henry VIII’s father. Had the young duke survived to adulthood, historians consider it very possible that the king would have put the duke in the line of succession. (The young Henry FitzRoy died right after the execution of Anne Boleyn, which led Henry VIII to rewrite his line of succession.)
So at a time when fathers of children born out of wedlock, especially among the nobility, were expected to provide some financial assistance and recognition of paternity, Henry actually went above and beyond what most of his contemporaries would have done.
Biden, half a century after the Supreme Court abolished common-law disabilities imposed upon children born out of wedlock, cannot fathom giving Navy Joan Roberts even his name, let alone the financial support her mother demands. However he may wish to deny it, Navy Joan is biologically and literally a Biden daughter. Even by 16th-century standards, his punishment is both cruel and unusual.