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Dobson
James 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.
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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.
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Some things are, indeed, just stupid, but I think I can categorically state that he and I don't agree on what they are.
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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.
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The Blood of Martyrs is the Seed of the Church
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He's been on the radar of 'attachment parents' for a while, now.
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Not only that, he beat the dog in a total frenzy!
Re: Not only that, he beat the dog in a total frenzy!
minor point comment
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.
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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."
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