Thank you for answering the questions. Truth be told, I never heard "Boy I don't care how old you are! You disrespect me and I will still beat your ass down!" in our house. Probably because we weren't overtly violent in nature, nor were my parents.
The problem i see with all of your answers, is that your protraying the issues as highly subjective. Now, i can understand this to a degree. After all, there is no manuel for being a parent, and there is always going to be a grey area when it comes to parenting. The problem with your answers though is just how much of a grey area they create. Using your examples, I could beat the fuck out of my 25 year old daughter for talking back to me, because those are the rules i've made and I feel like i'm being a good parent because i'm teaching her.
As for the comedian, it was amusing, and there was likely some truth to it. Funny thing about comedy though is that it can be told in regards to pretty much anything and find an audience, no matter what the subject is. Hell, we commonly tell each other tales of our misfortune which, while not funny at the time, are able to be laughed about later. Had the comedian told the same story, but removed the humor elements and changed how he told it a bit, it could have just as easily been in a drama movie.
If you have never heard that phrase about no matter how old you are, you parents can still "take you out", then that was your household. Nothing wrong with that. However, in the environment I grew up in, we always heard it. The funny thing is, today, we joked about that. I was going over this whole topic with some people at work, and we laughed because we remember all the wild and crazy things our parents told us when they were spanking us. We knew the parents weren't really going to hit us in the face, or kill us, or cause some harm greater than the spanking, even when they were telling us they were going to. That is why I can watch this video of the judge disciplining his daughter and can see that it is not child abuse.
Child abuse would show the father actually DOING the threats of harming beyond the spanking on her legs and rear end. Had I saw him hitting her upperbody with the belt, or her face, then of course I would be outraged. But his targets were her legs/rear end. He used a belt. There are those who were spanked with a "switch" (tree branch...). We survived. We look back and chuckle over how we behaved during those interactions with our parents. How we used to run and try to avoid getting hit. What child actually stands there? Natural reaction to move. Parents screaming to stay still or "you'll get it worse!" and we still moved. In the end, we do not feel we were abused at all. We were disciplined just like kid's that go to "timeout".
It's all about perspective. Unless you lived and experienced corporal punishment similar to the video, people will think that was child abuse. Going from my own perspective, and my own experience, that footage was typical parent discipline. The key parts to me to make me think it wasn't abuse was what his actual physical interactions were to the child. He did not strike her upperbody. He did not strike her face. He did not cause bleeding. I listened to what he was saying, not the tone of the voice. That's where I got my opinion. You may agree or disagree, but I am not wrong in my opinion. Just like I am not saying you guys are wrong. I know I will not change your minds. All I am trying to do, is show you guys a different perspective.
Apparantely, that goes over people's heads....