Children are our most precious resource, the saying goes, and like any natural resource, their ownership and control are hotly contested. Are children chattel? Do parents have the right to run their own little private social laboratories? Or are kids effectively state property, with bodies and minds in which the government has an overriding interest?
The religiously and conservatively inspired seem to be particularly exercised this week with a Liberal senate bill to ban the spanking of children. My favourite flat-out crazy response to this legislation was written by Licia Corbella in the Calgary Herald. She claims that one organization that backs the bill also lobbied successfully years ago for the equalization of the age of consent for gay and straight sex. She notes that the group “that worked so doggedly to make it illegal for loving parents to spank their children is the very same group that successfully worked to make it legal for a stranger to sodomize a 14-year-old!”
Wow. How is it that the most sex-phobic and alarmist of moral scolds are also often the most graphic? I have encountered this before, by the way, at what is ostensibly the other end of the ideological spectrum. I went to a university lecture once by feminist and anti-porn crusader Catherine MacKinnon. Her imagery was exceptionally vivid, with talk of “penises slicing in and out of women” and “taking the gags out of women’s mouths.”
Anyway, getting back to Corbella’s column, she uses the “loving parents” phrase four times, hammering away at what she sees as an unbridgeable gap between the parental right and duty to protect (and control) children, and the liberal state’s NGO-sponsored attempts to undermine the parent-child relationship.
Spanking children is part of a loving relationship to many such people, in spite of a growing stack of peer-reviewed studies reporting that physical discipline of children is no more healthy or educational than hitting adults, a phenomenon that only gradually fell from favour in the history of Western society. Physical “correction” of wives was legal in most common law jurisdictions well into the 19th century (and was socially acceptable much later than that), and corporal punishment was allowed in Canadian prisons until 1972.
The only Canadians who can still legally be hit are children aged 2 to 13. Corporal punishment of children has been banned in several European Union states, as well as in Norway and Israel, and it is only a matter of time before the same happens here, regardless of the fate of the current bill in Parliament.
The battle to maintain the right to spank is very much wrapped up with the urge to “protect” children’s minds as well. In this context, I don’t believe that Corbella’s reference to “sodomizing” was incidental. Social conservatives of this kind see hitting children as logically and morally consistent with keeping them in the dark about sex, even though sex education today is arguably a matter of life and death.
In what is likely a portent of things to come, the Vancouver School Board announced last Friday that it will be implementing provincial education ministry policy that bars parents from preventing their children from being taught about—ahem—“alternative sexuality.” There’s that sodomy again. Catholic and other conservative organizations are trying to help the small minority of parents opposed to the new policy circumvent it, but I’m hoping that the board and the province stand their ground.
If anyone needs education about sex and sexual health issues, it is precisely those students whose parents want to keep knowledge away from them. And yes, I question the motives and even the competence of any “loving parent” who isn’t open to a rational, factual discussion of these matters with their children. Unfortunately, some parents can’t be relied upon to do this, and this is one of those times where the state, in the form of the school, must intercede.
I also believe, however, that most parents do see the connection between working to diminish ignorance and genuine protection of, and respect for, their children. I agree with social conservatives that no school or other state organization will ever love children as much as their parents do. At the same time, I believe reasonable people recognize that no one can mess up a child quite like a misguided parent. The “war” between parents and the state doesn’t really exist, as far as I can see, except at the margins. And this is as it should be, as children benefit most when parents and schools work together in the best interests of young minds and bodies.
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