Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Spanking Ban

A lot of you have probably heard about California's proposed spanking ban, which would send parents to jail for a year if they spank a child under age three. The (irrational) logic is that all spanking is necessarily child abuse.

The author of the bill, Assemblywoman Lieber, does not have children herself but she does have a cat named “Snoop.” (Appropriate, I think, because of her fondness for government meddling.) Ms. Lieber does not spank her cat and rationalizes that, “If you never hit a cat, you should never hit a kid.”

This is one reason I love working in California policy. Probably half of the legislators out there think that you can make perfect analogies between animals and humans because they are the same thing (except for preborn humans, which are nothing). And I'm not kidding.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

And I never let my fish out of the water, so why should I let my kids breathe air?

Too bad she doesn't raise dogs.

Anonymous said...

So spraying a kid in the face w/a water bottle to train them not to touch something is appropriate? Nice.

Anonymous said...

H hadn't heard of this! Normally, I'd say "What a stupid idea," and shrug it off as just another crackpot idea that gets proposed to become a law, they're a dime-a-dozen. But considering the state is CA, I'm actually worried.

If my cats fight, I smack them across the room to separate them. Should I do that to my child if he gets in a fight, or should I sit him down, talk with him, and (depending on the circumstances) spank him to drive the point home?

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, another thought - I think that I'm very glad that Assemblywoman Lieber doesn't have children. If she does have children at some point, I hope she learns quickly, for her kids' (and the rest of society) sake.