In which I am late to the party
The thing I hate about school holidays is that suddenly there are children everywhere. How can they possibly have finished learning everything? And how come Playstation is only fun when they have homework to do, and the rest of the time their preferred pastime is "going to town to scuff my jeans up"?
Anyway, today, many of the children (and I use the term here as a Worldly Great Old One of Almost Twenty-Seven; they were actually high-school students) were engaged in efforts to get me to sign a petition to force a referendum to reverse the Anti-Smacking Law (I liked the way they had recycled old signs by pasting the word "Law" over where they used to say "Bill"). I haven't really had much to say on the issue, certainly not when it was actually topical, but something about the way they presented their argument really got to me. For one thing, none of them actually looked old enough to sign the petition itself, which made me wonder at their motivations (although the letter Proverbs and the numbers 13 and 24 come to mind).
The thrust of their argument seemed to be that "[Sue] Bradford's Law Criminalises Good Parents", which seemed eerily familiar. A few years ago, the government outlawed smoking in bars, and there was a fairly similar sort of outcry (albeit with fewer children). The Government's reasoning was that second-hand smoke had been proven to be harmful; the protesters argued (somewhat tangentially) that smoking was their right, and the two sides never really met in the middle: the Government just won, as is the way with governments everywhere.
Now, I know some perfectly decent people who smoked in bars before the law change, just as I know some perfectly decent people who smack their kids (my own dear parents included). None of them have killed me so far. But the fact remains that, just as second-hand smoke contributes more than it should to New Zealand's outgoings, there are people who end up killing their own children simply because it is their inalienable (god-given?) right to smack your kids. Let me state my official position, for the record:
People who believe their right to do something that is harmful to another human being outweighs that other's right to not be harmed are fucking batshit crazy.
This seems like basic common sense, right? So it seems to me that the drive for these pieces of legislation is to put people's "god-given rights" into perspective. If society says you in fact don't have the right to hit your kids, maybe that could slowly start changing some attitudes? And all you good parents: if giving up your "right" to smack your kids could change even one person's mind and prevent one child's death, wouldn't that be worth it?
Just personally: I still wouldn't have a problem with smacking a child of mine if I was sure that that was the only way to communicate that they were in immediate danger of physical harm. Shit, I wouldn't even have a problem if it was someone else that did the smacking in that case. But if a kid is old enough to lie to me, I'd think there'd be more appropriate (and ultimately pedagogically sound) punishments than a smack on the bum.
So I'm going back tomorrow, armed with a couple of bits of paper: "Bradford's Bill Criminalises Lazy Parents" and "Bradford's Bill Criminalises Selfish Bigots".
I figure they can just stick them over the top of the ones they've already got.