Spanking time!

I’ve written about liberals giving themselves away on many occasions. Let’s do that again tonight. Tonight’s topic is spanking. Yes, spanking. It turns out that despite what talk radio will lament, you can in fact spank your children. SO sayeth the Court.

Here’s what happened. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled last week that parents may in fact spank their children, ruling that spanking “remains firmly woven into our nation’s social fabric” and “it follows that we must guard against the imposition of criminal sanctions for the use of parenting techniques still widely regarded as permissible and warranted.” Wow, common sense!

The one caveat on the ruling, which makes sense too, is that the spanking can only involve “reasonable force” so as not to cause the child physical harm or mental distress. That makes sense and it fits with the normal rules for use of force in tort cases.

This rule represents a clear victory for traditional child rearing concepts and a blow to whiny liberal experts who have been trying to stop spanking for years, especially as the ruling came in a very blue state. This was not a spank happy Texas court.

Anyhoo, the liberal we will now discuss is Rachel Bersche, who wrote a length article about the decision for Yahoo and her cited expert Deborah Gilboa, some child-rearing expert. Rachel dutifully reported the decision but quickly and repeatedly warned us that “experts say that even though spanking may be permissible, it’s not advisable.” In fact, the bulk of the article is basically about how spanking is a horrible thing. In making this case, she quotes Gilboa without raising any of the obvious problems with what she says.

According to Gilboa, there is only one time that spanking is effective when it comes to raising a child. That is where it is an expected form of punishment and “it is normal across that child’s community,” but “that’s just not the case in our society anymore.”

Now first, let me point out the ludicrousness of this. If spanking is bad because it teaches kids to be violent, as Gilboa claims, then why would it suddenly not teach that lesson if everybody’s doing it? That’s nonsense.

What’s more, consider her statement that spanking just isn’t “normal across the community in our society anymore.” Right before this quote, Rachel quotes a poll that found that 78% of parents think spanking is appropriate and 67% say they have spanked their kids, with 30% of 1-year olds having been spanked in the past month.

I would call that pretty darn widespread if 8 of 10 parents approve of it. Wouldn’t you? Apparently, Rachel and Gilboa don’t. This reminds me of the debate about the Washington Redskins’ name where liberals are stretching a poll that found that more than 8 in 10 people approved of the name into claiming a “significant and widespread opposition to the name.” Yeah right. The existence of a fringe does not a lack of consensus make, and less than 2 in 10 is a fringe.

Gilboa also makes the classic mistake of presenting only one side of the ledger when it comes to costs and benefits. She claims that spanking doesn’t work because “it undermines the trust the child has with the parent.” But she never examines the flip side, which is that respect is vital to trust and children won’t trust a parent they don’t respect and they won’t respect a parent who is incapable of enforcing rules. Time outs and hand wringing simply aren’t enough for some people to be able to enforce their rules.

Further, Gilboa whines that the problem with spanking is that it “undermines the message that we don’t hit people to get what we want.” Only, spanking is not done by the parent to get something from the child. It is to remind the child that they should not be doing something. It is a punishment, not a form of extortion.

So in two very fundamental ways, Gilboa misunderstands the nature of spanking and she completely distorts the behavior of society to make her point, and Rachel never seems to call her on it because she’s too busy telling us how spanking is bad. This is so typical of liberals, but you find it in other places too. They want you to believe something, so they give you a one-sided presentation of it, hoping that you’ll go away nodding your head like an idiot believing what they want without ever questioning it.

As for spanking itself, I personally find there are much better methods of enforcing rules. The best method involves taking away privileges. This is something prison wardens talk about. The reason they provide things like weight rooms and good food is so that they can take it away when the inmates misbehave. That has proven to be infinitely more effective than threats of violence.

I also find it interesting that the one thing liberals never seem to connect with spanking in their diatribes is that spanking sends the message that might makes right. That is a lesson we should not be teaching, yet I think liberals kind of like that one since might happens to be the only way they can push their ideas on the rest of us.

Thoughts?