The super-smart takes on the Adrian Peterson debacle just keep coming. Almost as soon as the Minnesota Vikings running back was indicted for child abuse, people started chiming in with all sorts of opinions they should probably have kept to themselves: Charles Barkley called beating a child just a black, Southern thing. CBS found an expert to argue that the line between discipline and child abuse is just really, really blurry. And now Fort-Worth Star Telegram sports columnist Mac Engel beseeches us not to judge Petersen just because he "overdid it," adding, with what is probably meant to be folksy charm, "there are a lot of good people who administered similar whuppins before."

Engel is deeply concerned that Peterson is being "branded" with the label of child abuse, merely because he allegedly beat his four-year-old son with a switch dozens of times until he bled, a crime for which there is photo evidence, and which he admitted to in text messages to the child's mother, writing, "felt bad after the fact when I notice the switch was wrapping around hitting I [sic] thigh."

"What Peterson did could qualify as abuse," Engel writes. "But that does not make him an abuser." And calling him as an abuser, he adds, is "irrational and incorrect. In doing so, it would be an indirect indictment of millions of well-meaning moms and dads everywhere, past and present that accidentally cross the fuzzy line."

What's not irrational, by Engel's lights, is punishing your child for pushing one of his siblings off a "motorbike video game" by grabbing a tree branch, removing the leaves, and striking him repeatedly in the back, buttocks, ankles, legs and scrotum. That's certainly no reason to brand him with a label like "child abuser," which Engels notes is "a label that will never fade, even in death." That's unlike the wounds inflicted by a tree branch on a four-year-old's scrotum, which will eventually heal.

And really, Engel adds, is it relevant to mention that Peterson was investigated by Child Protective Services in 2013 for allegedly beating another one of his children, hitting the boy hard enough with an unknown object to scar his face? Isn't that merely "piling on," the columnist wonders, just spitballing, not taking a side here one way or the other? Just because Peterson didn't know when to "stop disciplining his misbehaving son(s)," although most adults would know that the line comes somewhere before they're bleeding from dozens of wounds?

Engel is on something of a roll, hot take-wise: as the Dallas Observer pointed out earlier today, he wrote less than a week ago that Ray Rice didn't deserve to be fired.

"How would any of us do if our worst personal moments were caught on video?" Engel pondered, adding, "A home with violence needs help, and Rice should be punished, and then he has to be allowed to live his life, including football. He must be allowed to demonstrate he is not that image, and his wife knows the risks, and the score."

That post appear to have been removed from the Star-Telegram's website, but you can enjoy — or at least experience — a cached version here.

[Image via Associated Press]