![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumJames Dobson (whom I despise) has the ear of the president.
Why do I despise him? It isn't that he said Spongebob was gay. He didn't. No, what he said was worse than that; he said Spongebob was being used to make children tolerant. Which means Dobson is against tolerance. More on that later.
His views on discipline are scary. Not that he advocates spanking, per se (I was spanked on occasion, I seem to have survived. On the other hand I can't really see myself using it as a tool, myself. I am not going to condemn it, out of hand), but rather the ways in which he describes it.
Should a child be spanked with a hand or some other object?
Question
There is some controversy over whether a parent should spank with his or her hand or with some other object, such as a belt or paddle. What do you recommend?
Answer
I recommend a neutral object of some type.
To those who disagree on this point, I'd encourage them to do what seems right. It is not a critical issue to me. The reason I suggest a switch or paddle is because the hand should be seen as an object of love -- to hold, hug, pat, and caress. However, if you're used to suddenly disciplining with the hand, your child may not know when she's about to be swatted and can develop a pattern of flinching when you make an unexpected move. This is not a problem if you take the time to use a neutral object.
My mother always used a small switch, which could not do any permanent damage. But it stung enough to send a very clear message. One day when I had pushed her to the limit, she actually sent me to the backyard to cut my own instrument of punishment. I brought back a tiny little twig about seven inches long. She could not have generated anything more than a tickle with it. She never sent me on that fool's errand again.
Elsewhere he says that if spanking doesn't seem to be be working (and recall, his preferred method is with, "a neutral object") it's probably because one is being too gentle.
He does admit that spanking might not work for all. The child may be of stronger will than the parent. The child may have ADHD, and spanking will prove counter-productive. He does seem to think, however, the vast majority of children will respond to it. One just needs to be firm enough.
He also thinks it's not just for parents, but also for designated authority figures, "Corporal punishment is not effective at the junior and senior high school levels, and I do not recommend its application. It can be useful for elementary students, especially with amateur clowns (as opposed to hard-core troublemakers). For this reason, I am opposed to abolishing spanking in elementary schools because we have systematically eliminated the tools with which teachers have traditionally backed up their word. We're down now to a precious few. Let's not go any further in that direction."
Why am I looking at his attitudes on physical punishment?
Because of his son, being groomed to replace him as the head of Focus on the Family.
Ryan Dobson is portrayed, with deliberation, as a "rebel for Christ," and his take on what needs to happen to make America right is this, "Kids today are looking for something to die for, they're looking for a cause," Ryan said. "If you give them something to die for, they'll go to the edge of the earth for you. Kids like that give me hope for revolution in America."
That was from his new book 2Die4, which follows his first book, Be Intolerant, Because Some Things are Just Stupid.
At the National Religious Broadcasters conference he was interviewed by Media Transparency Air Jesus, "During a brief Q&A session, I asked Ryan if he thought there were any specific causes kids should die for. I wanted to know if he sought to literally usher children toward martyrdom like some Hamas lieutenant or was just using jarring rhetoric to spur apathetic teens to activism.
Without hesitation Ryan responded, "People keep saying we need to change the discussion on abortion before we can ban it. We don't need to change the discussion. Like 80 percent of the country is against abortion," he stated, citing some highly dubious polling data. "What kind of country fines people $25,000 for killing a bald eagle but doesn't do anything when unborn babies get thrown in the trash?" But before he could complete his apparent endorsement of a violent struggle to stop abortion, Ryan trailed off on a platitude about keeping himself "pure" for his fiancee.
Now I may not be an expert, but I can't see a whole lot of "kids" as Ryan Dobson calls them, who are going to go out and let themselves be killed as martyrs. One, I don't see all that many of the Evil Left running around threatening to kill them, and two, they are not the stuff of which Ghandis are made.
The audience Dobson aims at is the audience which wants to kill those who, "oppose our way of life,", which means they have a certain inclination for violence, at least at the rhetorical level. Looking at Tim McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, the Christian Identity Movement, the preachers who say killing, "abortionists" isn't a sin; may even be a calling, and the like, I see the possibility of people, even kids, dying in this, "revolution," but it doesn't start with Dobson's adherents.
Why do I despise him? It isn't that he said Spongebob was gay. He didn't. No, what he said was worse than that; he said Spongebob was being used to make children tolerant. Which means Dobson is against tolerance. More on that later.
His views on discipline are scary. Not that he advocates spanking, per se (I was spanked on occasion, I seem to have survived. On the other hand I can't really see myself using it as a tool, myself. I am not going to condemn it, out of hand), but rather the ways in which he describes it.
Should a child be spanked with a hand or some other object?
Question
There is some controversy over whether a parent should spank with his or her hand or with some other object, such as a belt or paddle. What do you recommend?
Answer
I recommend a neutral object of some type.
To those who disagree on this point, I'd encourage them to do what seems right. It is not a critical issue to me. The reason I suggest a switch or paddle is because the hand should be seen as an object of love -- to hold, hug, pat, and caress. However, if you're used to suddenly disciplining with the hand, your child may not know when she's about to be swatted and can develop a pattern of flinching when you make an unexpected move. This is not a problem if you take the time to use a neutral object.
My mother always used a small switch, which could not do any permanent damage. But it stung enough to send a very clear message. One day when I had pushed her to the limit, she actually sent me to the backyard to cut my own instrument of punishment. I brought back a tiny little twig about seven inches long. She could not have generated anything more than a tickle with it. She never sent me on that fool's errand again.
Elsewhere he says that if spanking doesn't seem to be be working (and recall, his preferred method is with, "a neutral object") it's probably because one is being too gentle.
He does admit that spanking might not work for all. The child may be of stronger will than the parent. The child may have ADHD, and spanking will prove counter-productive. He does seem to think, however, the vast majority of children will respond to it. One just needs to be firm enough.
He also thinks it's not just for parents, but also for designated authority figures, "Corporal punishment is not effective at the junior and senior high school levels, and I do not recommend its application. It can be useful for elementary students, especially with amateur clowns (as opposed to hard-core troublemakers). For this reason, I am opposed to abolishing spanking in elementary schools because we have systematically eliminated the tools with which teachers have traditionally backed up their word. We're down now to a precious few. Let's not go any further in that direction."
Why am I looking at his attitudes on physical punishment?
Because of his son, being groomed to replace him as the head of Focus on the Family.
Ryan Dobson is portrayed, with deliberation, as a "rebel for Christ," and his take on what needs to happen to make America right is this, "Kids today are looking for something to die for, they're looking for a cause," Ryan said. "If you give them something to die for, they'll go to the edge of the earth for you. Kids like that give me hope for revolution in America."
That was from his new book 2Die4, which follows his first book, Be Intolerant, Because Some Things are Just Stupid.
At the National Religious Broadcasters conference he was interviewed by Media Transparency Air Jesus, "During a brief Q&A session, I asked Ryan if he thought there were any specific causes kids should die for. I wanted to know if he sought to literally usher children toward martyrdom like some Hamas lieutenant or was just using jarring rhetoric to spur apathetic teens to activism.
Without hesitation Ryan responded, "People keep saying we need to change the discussion on abortion before we can ban it. We don't need to change the discussion. Like 80 percent of the country is against abortion," he stated, citing some highly dubious polling data. "What kind of country fines people $25,000 for killing a bald eagle but doesn't do anything when unborn babies get thrown in the trash?" But before he could complete his apparent endorsement of a violent struggle to stop abortion, Ryan trailed off on a platitude about keeping himself "pure" for his fiancee.
Now I may not be an expert, but I can't see a whole lot of "kids" as Ryan Dobson calls them, who are going to go out and let themselves be killed as martyrs. One, I don't see all that many of the Evil Left running around threatening to kill them, and two, they are not the stuff of which Ghandis are made.
The audience Dobson aims at is the audience which wants to kill those who, "oppose our way of life,", which means they have a certain inclination for violence, at least at the rhetorical level. Looking at Tim McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, the Christian Identity Movement, the preachers who say killing, "abortionists" isn't a sin; may even be a calling, and the like, I see the possibility of people, even kids, dying in this, "revolution," but it doesn't start with Dobson's adherents.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-02-28 11:25 pm (UTC)A US congressman just recently boasted about telling Bush he proposed a nuclear strike on Syria in order to remove and WMDs.
So yeah, they want to have a genocide some time soon. They'll complain about irrational Bush hatreed, but the fact is, plenty of them want to see us and anyone else who stands in thier way dead.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-28 11:50 pm (UTC)Some things are, indeed, just stupid, but I think I can categorically state that he and I don't agree on what they are.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 12:15 am (UTC)To die for? Puhleese. But these people are deadly serious- both about death and 'revolution' of our government into a theonomic one.
I keep thinking of my old oath of military service- particularly protecting the Constitution of this country "against all enemies foreign and domestic". If these creeps aren't the definition of 'domestic' I don't know what is.
I am not anti-Christian, just anti-fascist. If these people succeed in their 'revolution', it will be a sad day for the US.
PS: if you got two emails on this, it's because I forgot a '>' on the original post.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 06:07 am (UTC)Yep, I'm keeping my powder dry.
And tabs on the local loonies.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 06:08 am (UTC)TK
The Blood of Martyrs is the Seed of the Church
Date: 2005-03-01 06:28 am (UTC)But when I was a young Catholic conservative, and Nate has spoken of the same things among Protestants in the Antipodes, it was all envisioning *us* as being the victims, like the Jesuit martyrs or in the gulags or in some future dystopia.
At some point - and it seems to have really attained escape velocity at the end of the 80s/early 90s, but I'm not exactly sure where the turn came (though in the US it seems to have gotten a strong push at Thomas Aquinas College in California) where it went from a Martyr mentality to a Crusader mentality. The Crusader Ideal was always there, don't get me wrong. Lots of romance about Acre and paiens en tort, Chretiens en droit and Roland and Richard etc. But it wasn't a *realistic* dream to us, whereas people were always getting arrested in China or Russia for their religion, and having their right to profess their beliefs taken away here (so we were always told in our conservative newspapers) so it seemed quite plausible a future.
Somewhere along the line, the black helicopter/blue helmet crowd ended up in our spiritual bomb shelter, and there was a fusion/convergience of memes, and the result was books like MacFarlane's Pierced by a Sword (available on Amazon, the quantity sold claims are a joke, I knew people involved in the distribution, they gave it away and claimed it as sales) and the Left Behind series, which is actively militaristic, as opposed to This Present Darkness, which was full of martial-arts combat - but only between angels. Ordinary Christians just Suffered Nobly.
And now the pro-active, "preemptive counter-martyrdom" Crusader mentality is in full swing. I saw it as it was going on, in pieces and bits, but I didn't understand it as a threat until it was too late (and nobody would have believed me, at the time, even if I had.)
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 12:37 am (UTC)He's been on the radar of 'attachment parents' for a while, now.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 01:51 am (UTC)I also swatted a child I was baby-sitting when he threw a large stone at (and hit) the family dog. I figured that if at 3 1/2 years old, he hadn't figured out that one doesn't throw stones at the family dog, then some other means of teaching that lesson were needed. The dog was a Brittany Spaniel and foolishly, stupidly adoring of the family. He wasn't going to teach the child the lesson that needed learning.
I also bit a kitten who was biting me. She had the habit of biting my ankle with no provocation. When she bit me, I swooped her up, bit her on her hind paw until she squeaked, and put her down. Two consequences. First off, she never bit an ankle again. Second off, I picked Persian cat fur out of my mouth for minutes! Worth it, though.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 01:57 am (UTC)I will say one thing -- if a babysitter ever laid a hand on my child, I would press charges. I would imagine it would have to do with whatever is laid out between parent and sitter, the permission of letting a non parent hit your child, but even then, I think that if physical punishment is bad, then a non parent/guardian doing it is a lot worse. But I am not the parent of the child you hit. But even if it was a relative, charges would be pressed to the fullest. I take the physical and emotional/mental safety of my children very seriously.
You are lucky that you were in a situation where the parents didn't press charges. You'd probably even get a record with CPS, which stays with you for a very long time.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 02:09 am (UTC)I took one swat at the bottom of the child who heaved a three pound stone at the dog. Again, more noise than impact, and said "this is what the dog feels, so, you have to feel it too". I was trying to, and apparently did, communicate that what the child did to the dog was painful and unpleasant and shouldn't be repeated.
The parents were upset, but I could have as easily taken them to the authorities for animal cruelty. The dog limped for several days after being hit by the rock.
I later heard from one of the parents that the child was much gentler with the family dog after my intervention.
And I absolutely do not approve of beating a dog with a belt. I agree that this is a big difference and I would never spank a child with more than a swat of the hand. Again, more noise than impact.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 02:21 am (UTC)Everyone raises their own children their own way. If hitting your children works, and has no ill effects, I wouldn't get on your case about it, you know? I just find it ineffective for my children, and feel it sends out the wrong message. Your milage may vary.
Every time I read the passage about Dobson and the dog, I cringe.
http://www.geocities.com/cddugan/DobsonsDog.html
Granted, an anti-Dobson site, but has actual quotes from the book.
Not only that, he beat the dog in a total frenzy!
Date: 2005-03-01 06:42 am (UTC)I can tell you one thing, that man would never have done it (never have dared) to do it to a Neufie, nor even a Lab. There is probably a reason why he owns a dog the size of a large cat, and no larger. I've seen other Good Christian Conservative Leaders do the same thing, to their dogs, btw. It's horrific - and even more horrific that we accepted it as normal, at the time.
My opinions on corporal punishment are...extremely nuanced. But a very abridged version is that any parent who *wants* to hit their child, and any adult who passionately, furiously, and at great length, expounds on the Divine Right of parents and their god-given mandate to not "spare the rod," is someone who should never be allowed to care for a child - or an animal. Any kind of animal, from mouse to horse.
I say that after having grown up in a strict corporal-punishment family, where I was guilted into believing and regurgitating the "I was a spoiled brat who needed to be beaten with a hairbrush," for decades, until suddenly - after working with a couple of abused horses - I rebelled, reared back and said - No. I was raised by insecure, angry-hearted people who could not stand to have any dissent or challenge and did not know how to deal with ordinary human friction save by compelling submission, and coped with their guilt afterwards by alternately giving gifts, getting maudlin and weepy, or by pushing the guilt off on us for being so bad as to deserve punishment. I was three. They were twenty-five. When my horse spooks or snaps because of my carelessness, I do not get angry at my horse - and if I do, if I cannot help it, then I must put it aside, acknowledge it and shove it away, and deal with the situation as if I were not angry.
It's all become so much of a feedback loop that I can't split out where learning to cooperate with large animals safely taught me to understand the Tao, and the Tao taught me to ride with humility and without anger, but the phrase "Be a leader, not a butcher!" is something that struck like a bell throughout. And never trying to force anything - not my horse, not myself - but to rather by as water, finding the way of least friction. (And then, fairly easily, it became clear to me why the Plains tribes called them "big dogs" :) But the Tao has lessons for parents in it there, too, I think (as someone who has raised/help raise more children than most parents ever do...)
Re: Not only that, he beat the dog in a total frenzy!
Date: 2005-03-01 04:31 pm (UTC)One of my step-fathers (who came from a very different tradition on the subject) hit me with a belt a couple of times. It hurt, a lot. Had it been more than twice in the five years, it might have bordered on abuse.
We're still close, and I know why he did it, but I think he was wrong.
My mother would, on rare occasions (and never past the age of about 11) paddle us with a wooden spoon. I think I could probably recall the times, and the reasons. The threat of the spoon (rattled in drawers when we were too rowdy) was probably more useful to general order than it ever was.
It stung. One rubbed one's bottom for a few minutes.
I have, as an NCO, used the tap to the back of the head to get a troops attention. What I can't see is using pain to teach my kid.
As you say, I don't do it with my dog (though I have to say it might not be so bad for Dobson. If he has truly established an alpha relationship with his dog. The one time I pounded on Oliver, it was out of fear and frustration [I was afraid he was going to injure a horse, or get stomped... when I got him out of the stall I was crying and punching him... I don't think I have ever felt so sad and self-guilty and relieved in my life. He just lay there and took it. Mind you, it wasn't a belt). I've seen large dogs cowed by little people It helps the person to have been in charge since the animal was a puppy).
What I am afraid of the blurring of the lines. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
TK
minor point comment
Date: 2005-03-01 01:45 am (UTC)The parents who depend on spanking as a form of discipline have fallen into a trap.
My parents used spanking as the sole form of discipline for me when I was a child. It was direct and easy. To be fair, there was the shaming/raised voice, too, but the serious stuff was punished by being spanked. When they decided I was "too old" to be spanked, roughly 12 or 13, they had _no_ other modes of punishment developed.
They fell back on grounding me. This was counterproductive because I was an anti-social creature, perfectly content to go to school, come home, and sit around and read. We didn't have a television, so I couldn't be deprived of that. There was no way of depriving me of reading material, there was simply too much of it all over the house. So, they grounded me. Big woop.
This worked how well? Two stories illustrate that it failed entirely.
First story: My mother grounded me "indefinitely" when I was 17, the summer between high school and college. I'm still grounded. She died years later without rescinding the edict. (I'm 48, going on 49, and still grounded.)
Second story (possibly more to the point). That same summer, my mother grounded me for a week or two. And I replied that I'd stay home and make her life miserable. And I did.
So, apart from all the ethical/moral/philosophical considerations about spanking as a form of punishment, there's a practical side. It becomes very easy to depend on, leaving parents with no other tools to use.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 05:38 am (UTC)Intolerance was high up on the list, including (not surprisingly) "intolerance of ambiguity." Also: "Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way, the authors commented in a published reply to the article."
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 10:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 04:19 pm (UTC)During the "shooting war" (Apr-May) I was OB-NCOIC for the V Corps HumInt Co. We were incharge (ha!) of interrogating EPWs for Corps. No one talked to us about how to manage prisoner flow, much less evaluate them. Hopped from Kuwait, to An Najaf, to Dogwood (SSW of Baghdad).
After the war stopped, we were chopped out in to TacHumInt teams and detailed out to lesser commands (BCT and Div) from Baghdad to Kirkuk and Mosul (with some side trips to Al Sulamuniya. Bn HQ was in Al Sahra, just NNW of Tikrit, and the team I was part of the OMT for was in Al Qu'ayarra (west).
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-03-01 05:24 pm (UTC)I forgot to give the actual unit. A/519 MI BN