One of the more depressing developments in the Adrian Peterson child abuse case is the number of people, from his fellow athletes to fellow Texans and Southerners, who have been proudly declaring how badly they were “whupped” when they were kids.

“My momma’d be in jail for life if they saw how she whupped me!” says one. “I used to get whupped so bad I couldn’t sit down for two, three days,” says another. “That’s the way you raise kids in the South,” declares another proud whuppee.

It is sad to think that millions of kids across the country are getting that kind of discipline, simply because that’s the way their parents were raised.

The proud whupping recipients always point out how the beatings straightened them out, kept them from lives of crime, and how they always knew their parents loved them despite the violence. Maybe their parents knew when to stop, or how to mix in some hugs with the belts.

“Violence,” Author Isaac Asimov wrote in his “Foundation” trilogy, “is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

To incompetent parents, then, whuppings are what you deliver when you don’t know any better way to discipline a child.

Whatever else the courts do with Adrian Peterson, some parenting classes would be in order.