It's a good thing these people don't use drugs; imagine how paranoid they'd be. Wait a minute...

... will provide you with the Word of God that says you gotta beat the tar out of your kids or they'll be headed straight to hell. Listenin' to that devil music, shakin' their behinds, darin' to question the church/parents/priests, they're badddd. They were probably asking to be molested, anyway.

I remember being a young teenager on a trip from Pittsburgh to Belle Fountaine, Ohio. Somewhere on the Ohio Turnpike my father lost his temper with us kids. I don't remember the proximate cause, but it happened about the same time every car trip. He was threatening to pull over and spank the lot of us, when he remembered that we were in Ohio, which had recently made spanking illegal. His anger became a truly terrifying white rage. Fortunately, he managed to deal with it by screaming for a while.

In retrospect, I wonder if spanking had actually been outlawed, or if some relatively sane and toothless law was being interpreted by the fundies as meaning that corporal punishment was totally illegal. I remember a law forbidding schools from using corporal punishment being interpreted from the pulpit as outlawing all corporal punishment.

I find the anger that is generated by being forbidden to hit your kids to be quite frightening. It also, however, highlights the problem with corporal punishment in the first place. People don't hit their kids to discipline their kids, they hit their kids in order to make themselves feel better. While this is not a universal, it is an overwhelming majority. The issue is not how to raise their kids, but rather their property rights as the head of the family.

When my sister had her first child, she decided that she wouldn't use corporal punishment. My mother was horrified and badgered her and lectured her and quoted from the bible, threatened her with dire consequences. When Jonathan was about 2, I think, Bethany did start spanking her kids. Her eldest, the point of contention, is currently in jail. She has six more at home. It worries me to be related to these people, dammit.

Almost none of his advice is about actually dealing with your children, and the one bit that does -- the part about using broad-spectrum punishments, not just hitting -- could be taken as just another technique for looking good in court.

In the meantime, he's advising you to keep your children home from school if you've left visible marks on them, and to consider taking them out of public school entirely to reduce the chances that abuse will be reported. If he's all that concerned, I wonder at his not mentioning that both these practices can be very hard on kids, particularly the latter.

He says you should make sure your wife, church group, etc., are on your side. Notice that he never suggests that you enlist your kids. There's nothing about talking to them about why you discipline them the way you do. He gives no advice about how to help your kids deal with the situation if your treatment of them comes into question.

In fact, throughout his document, children are voiceless, without volition, having neither individual characters nor individual problems. There is no mention of interacting with them. Their happiness or unhappiness is simply not considered. I'm forced to believe that he's talking about possessions, not people.

I want to point out one more thing. Further down in the document, he mentions that you may wind up having to defend yourself in criminal, civil, and juvenile courts. (He gives this as evidence of how desperately unfair the system is when it's Out To Get You.)

If you're up on criminal charges, you're being tried for specific and defined criminal acts, on specific evidence. The rules for what constitutes evidence are strict, and they're biased in your favor. The occasional lurid miscarriages of justice aside, you don't wind up in criminal court because you're vaguely suspected of having some vague tendency to commit unspecified bad actions.

This guy is speaking in bad faith.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that my dad dealt with us in bad faith, and my mother dealt with us in good faith. I'm pretty sure that my mom was dealing in good faith with my sister when she insisted that not spanking was a sin. It was my dad that tended to lose control, but the worst bruises I ever got (including the one from the wooden spoon) were from my mom.

This guy, who knows? I wouldn't want to be his kid, I can tell you that. On the other hand, I can't help feeling a bit sad for people who get caught on the other side of the Fundamentalist line. It's an uncomfortable place, and the extremes you have to go to in order to justify yourself and your community are pretty horrible. My mother would probably agree and approve of this document.