Tag Archives: Spanking

News

Canada’s Liberal Party criminalizes spanking of children by parents

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Canada Election 2015: Socialists in red, Communists in Orange, Conservatives in blue
Canada Election 2015: Socialists in red, Communists in Orange, Conservatives in blue

Well, it didn’t take long for the Liberal majority to start discouraging men away from marriage and child-raising.

The leftist Globe and Mail reports:

In promising to enact all of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the federal Liberals have agreed to remove a section of law that allows parents to spank their kids without fear of prosecution.

[…]Kathy Lynn, the chair of a British Columbia-based organization called Corinne’s Quest, which opposes legalized spanking, says her group is “thrilled” with the TRC’s recommendation.

[…][T]eachers fear taking away the law could leave them vulnerable to charges in cases in which they are required to use force – breaking up schoolyard fights, for instance.

Does this ban on spanking make sense, rationally? Let’s look at the evidence and then decide.

Consider this story from the the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

A study found that youngsters smacked up to the age of six did better at school and were more optimistic about their lives than those never hit by their parents.

They were also more likely to undertake voluntary work and keener to attend university, experts discovered.

The research, conducted in the United States, is likely to anger children’s rights campaigners who have unsuccessfully fought to ban smacking in Britain.

[…]Those who had been smacked up to the age of six performed better in almost all the positive categories and no worse in the negatives than those never punished physically.

Teenagers who had been hit by their parents from age seven to 11 were also found to be more successful at school than those not smacked but fared less well on some negative measures, such as getting involved in more fights.

However, youngsters who claimed they were still being smacked scored worse than every other group across all the categories.

Prof Gunnoe found little difference in the results between sexes and different racial groups.

By the way, this is not the worst crime against parenting to come out of Canada. Remember the case where the divorced woman got a female lawyer, went before a female judge, in order to get the court to overturn her ex-husband’s grounding of their daughter for sending nude pictures from his computer? Yes. That’s what you get when you live in Canada – a nanny state society run by the left. I remember in a previous story, a female judge actually convicted a man for spanking his child. They went to court, and the man was convicted for spanking an unruly child. Why would any man want to raise kids who could not be punished for misbehaving?

I personally don’t like spanking as a way to discipline, but I can imagine situations where the behavior is so bad that a spanking might be necessary, e.g. – cruelty to pets, insulting their mother, etc. The point is that if I am the one getting up in the morning to go to work to earn the money, it’s my family, and my decision about what I am trying to produce. Public school teachers, judges and politicians work for me – I pay their salaries. They need to butt out of my private life and mind their own business. No man should get involved in a family if all he is going to do is pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce children who lack self-control and responsibility.

The path to responsibility goes through hard work and accepting the consequences for bad behavior. It’s much better to learn it when you are younger rather than older. Nobody likes spanking, but it’s better for a child to learn that stealing is wrong when he is 5 than when he is 25. And maybe that’s why so many boys who are raised fatherless become criminals. It is up to families to decide what punishment is best – not big government.

News

New trial for father convicted of assault for spanking child

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Map of Maritime Provinces in Canada
Map of Maritime Provinces in Canada

From Life Site News. (H/T Carolyn)

Excerpt:

A New Brunswick father who was convicted of assault for spanking his 6-year-old son in 2009 has been granted a re-trial by the New Brunswick Court of Appeal.

The court found that the original trial judge was too “subjective” in determining the severity of the spanking, and pointed out that Canadian law allows corporal punishment as long as the child is between two and 12 years old and only reasonable force is used.

In the original trial, the father told the court that he, his wife and their three children were driving from their home in Durham Bridge to a museum in Fredericton in August 2009 when his 6-year-old son became unruly. The court heard that the boy was screaming in the back seat, kicking the front seats, throwing things and unbuckling his seatbelt. The father said he repeatedly tried to calm the boy down and threatened to spank him if the bad behavior continued.

The mother eventually stopped the car and the father spanked the boy three times on the clothed buttocks, according to his testimony, adding that he slapped his own leg several times to warn the boy before administering the spanking.

Millicent Boldon, who testified at the original trial as a witness of the event, told the court she called the police after seeing the man slap the boy “at least ten times,” and heard the child yelling, “You’re beating me senseless. Stop. You’re hurting me.”

Another witness, Jim Burns, said he couldn’t tell if the father was striking the boy or not, as their backs were turned to him, but testified that he saw 18 “blows” delivered.

But Justice Richard Bell and Justice Wallace Turnbull said in their decision that they overturned the original conviction because the original judge, who is not named in the appeal ruling, erred in giving more credence to witnesses whose testimony was inconsistent than to the father, stating the original judge “applied a subjective standard when she said ‘no spanking should go on and on to the point that strangers pick up the phone and call the police.’”

According to Justice Bell, “In this case the trial judge’s sole basis for convicting the appellant flowed from the duration of the punishment. In my view she applied a subjective standard by delegating to an onlooker the determination of guilt or innocence.”

The disturbing thing about this situation is that the husband and wife did not make any mistake. Normally, I can blame the man for marrying a feminist who opposes moral judgment and discipline of any kind. But in this case, it’s not the wife who is to blame. It’s some other woman who calls the police. I think it’s significant that the caller in question is female and that the judge was female. It’s similar to the other case from Quebec in which a daughter and mother got a female lawyer and went to a female judge in order to get the father’s grounding of the daughter overturned. This case is much worse than that case, because there was nothing that could be done by the husband and wife to prevent it.

Why would any man get married in a society in which men are not respected as providers or the protectors in the family? Where men don’t have the right to try to form the character the children will have, (instead of the public schools, where a huge majority of the teachers are female)? What is the point of marriage for a man if he is just going to be a sperm donor and ATM? Do men have any role in disciplining children who behave in an abusive and selfish manner – especially to their own mothers? If not, then why should a man bother marrying at all, if he is just going to produce children who start out their lives by not respecting their own mothers? Do people not realize that boys who are raised without fathers are exactly the men who are more likely to treat women badly? No man should get involved in a family if all he is going to do is pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce children who lack self-control and responsibility. What is the point of that?

By the way, I think it would be very ironic if the woman who made the call were pro-abortion, which is quite likely to be the case, in Canada.

News

MUST-READ: Sweden jails parents for spanking and seizes their children

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From Life Site News. (H/T Mary)

Full article:

A Swedish district court has sentenced a couple to nine months each in prison and fined them the equivalent of US $10,650 after they admitted to spanking three of their four children as a normal part of their parenting methods. Corporal punishment of children by parents was made illegal in Sweden in 1979, an early step in what a U.S. parental rights lawyer called the nearly total take-over of parenting by the state in Sweden.

Court documents, quoted by Sveriges Television, said that the parents, who have not been named in the press, “explained that they had used, what they themselves described as spanking, physical punishment as part of their methods for raising the children.”

There is no indication of abuse by the parents in the released documents, with the court noting that the parents “had a loving and caring relationship with their children.”

Nevertheless, the parents have been sent to prison and fined 25,000 kronor for each of the “affected children.” The children have been remanded to state-sponsored foster care since early this summer, and Mike Donnelly, Director of International Relations for the US-based Home School Legal Defence Association (HSLDA), told LifeSiteNews.com that it is “extremely unlikely” that the children will ever be returned to their family home.

Donnelly said that the case is typical of the stories of many families with traditional values in Sweden: “In the area of family rights in Sweden things really aren’t going well there.”

While the HSLDA does not hold an official position on the use of corporal punishment, Donnelly said it is clearly up to parents to determine whether corporal punishment is an appropriate form of discipline.

“Parenting has been outsourced, or simply directly taken over by the state in Sweden,” Donnelly said. “And these parents have been jailed for doing what in America would be perfectly normal.”

Ninety percent of Swedish children are in publicly funded day care from extremely early ages, as young as a year or 18 months, he said. It is the position of the state that parents are overruled by the state in areas of child rearing, he said.

Donnelly said, however, that the best interests of the child are not the state’s highest priority: “So lets take these kids who have had a loving and caring relationship with their parents and send them to foster care, and throw their parents into jail for nine months.”

Donnelly cited the now notorious case of Domenic Johansson, the boy who was snatched by state officials because his parents were homeschooling him, an act that is also illegal in Sweden.

“The bottom line is, don’t go to Sweden. Don’t move there, if you want to have a normal family.”

Well, what do we learn from this story?

Sweden is the most secular country on the planet. They think that the world is an accident and that there is no way that people ought to be – since there is no Designer to hold us accountable to any objective standard of morality. Also, there is no such thing as human rights, such as the right to parent your children as you see fit. The state determines what counts as a right. And you don’t have any rights to your children – they belong to the state. If there is no God, then there is no objective morality, and thus parents have any authority to tell children how they ought to be, or to make moral judgments against them.

Given the  amount of regulation of the family by the state in Sweden, it makes no sense at all to start a family there. But other countries seem to want to follow along where Sweden is leading. Anyone who votes Democrat in the United States (or Liberal/NDP in Canada, or Labor/Liberal Democrat in the UK, or Labor/Green in Australia, etc.) is moving us towards where Sweden is now. Canada’s Liberal party actually has tried to pass a national day care system, and Hillary Clinton favors taxpayer-funded pre-Kindergarden. There is just something in the worldview of the secular left that wants to control the lives of others – a fascistic impulse that has no respect for the privacy of the family.

I should probably mention the word feminism, here. Sweden is also the most feminist country in the world, with laws requiring that boards of directors be 40% female. They do not want women to marry, they do not want women raising children. That is the state’s job, in Sweden. And most of the women in Sweden voted for it. They would rather have the state raise their children than raise the children themselves. They would rather have the state take 60% of their husband’s income and spend it on socialized day care than spend that money on their own family. Then they have the nerve to complain that men don’t want to make commitments. It’s ridiculous. The very laws that feminists vote for are the laws that destroy marriage, family and parenting. No one in his right mind should marry a feminist*.

(*Third-wave feminist)