Prediction: In 10 years, it’ll be illegal to spank your kids.
Progressivism’s never-ending zeal to intrude into our lives, bust up families and force us all to march to its grim beat means that yesterday’s absurdity turns into today’s hot topic in lefty opinion magazines, which turns into tomorrow’s law.
If the people resist such a change — if an actual statute can’t be passed — that matters little. Judges will simply impose their vision on us, chiding us all for not having the imagination to recognize that what looks like a radical new policy was there all along, lacking only a wise interpreter to come along to clarify it.
A headline this week noted that a Long Island man was cleared of abuse charges after he spanked his 8-year-old child for swearing at an adult. Most details were withheld because the matter was in Family Court, but what emerged was disturbing.
The father spent nearly two years being dragged through the court system after child protective services came after him, leading a Suffolk County judge to rule that he had used excessive corporal punishment. A four-judge panel in the state Appellate Division cleared the dad, saying that “The father’s open-handed spanking of the child as a form of discipline . . . was a reasonable use of force.”
For now.
Soon, right after liberals have finished their current project of ignoring popular opinion while forcing the renaming of professional sports teams to their liking, they’ll start telling us we need to line up with all the other civilized countries that ban spanking. (Sweden illegalized corporal punishment in 1979, and today more than 30 other countries have followed.) They’ll cite tendentious scientific studies that don’t hold up to scrutiny. They’ll say opponents are on the wrong side of history.
Liberal groups in California, Maryland and South Dakota have proposed anti-spanking laws, which in each case were shouted down by the voters. In the latter state, the Department of Social Services actually proposed going so far as to outlaw causing “emotional injury,” conjuring up a spectacle of judges listening earnestly as sobbing 6-year-olds tell them, “IT’S NOT FAIR” that they were denied pudding after failing to clean their rooms.
Two years ago, Delaware became the first state in the nation to outlaw spanking, threatening offenders with up to two years in prison. The law redefines child abuse as any act that causes “pain” on the part of the child. If spanking doesn’t cause pain, you’re not doing it right.
Backers of the Delaware bill (prominent among them the state’s Attorney General Beau Biden, son of the vice president) vowed that it didn’t outlaw spanking, but this was simply a willful deception of the voters. Biden and the other elites were determined to pass a startling policy change with or without popular support.
Biden’s emotional plea for passage of the bill was an almost comical illustration of the precept that it’s impossible to be too cynical whenever politicians cry, “But it’s for the children!”
Declared Beau Biden, “More than 3 million children are reported to be victims of abuse or neglect in the United States each year, and the US ranks higher in child abuse fatalities than any other industrialized nation in the world. Far too many children are the victims of abuse, neglect and assault and [this bill] will go a long way to better protect the children of this state.”
Child abuse fatalities? I’m pretty sure beating children to death was already illegal in Delaware, and everywhere else. That’s like passing a law against breath mints by saying, “Mouth cancer kills 13,000 Americans every year.” Scare people first, worry about the logical leaps later. Biden was tagging the (81 percent of) Americans who back corporal punishment as pro-child murder.
I wouldn’t spank my children and I have difficulty even watching others spank their kids. But it’s their business, not mine. My discomfort isn’t a good enough reason to unleash the full power of the state on a family.
Sure, spanking can be abusive if it goes too far. If a spanking turns into a beating, it becomes a police matter. But it’s commonly understood to be a brief punishment done with an open hand that leaves no lasting marks and causes mild temporary pain.
Liberalism has a genius for worrying about things that aren’t problems, then translating their fretting into legislation, which in turn creates real problems.
At some point, someone in Delaware is going to go to prison for spanking his or her kid. If you’re a child, which is more likely to ruin your life: a) getting spanked or b) losing a parent to prison for two years?