If you can’t argue your view without lying, don’t bother.

I’ve got 2 questions I’d like answered from a smacker:
1. Who would Jesus smack?
2. If you had $9million to spend on making this country a better place, what would you spend it on?
(other than having the right to inflict fear into your children)

But these normal, everyday people still have to follow the law. If the law states that it is okay to use force as a means of correction, than the courts have to follow that. No one, to my knowledge is claiming that all defenses should be removed, they shouldn’t, like you say, it is what our society hinges on. But we can still discuss whether a defense should be accepted under the law or not.

Also, in response to Zentiger’s comments about the 50% increase in notifications, I wish you would talk to those who answer the police phones. It really annoys me when claims are made about the police which are not based in fact. Increases in notifications are a good thing, it means more people are standing up for the children. And if you do talk to a call taker at the police, ask them when the last time they got a call about a smack was. Then ask when the last call about a child who has a broken bone from “correction”.

Yep! ….now a word from Otago…. “Get over it!”

First they said “reasonable force” was too hard to define.

Then the first part of the new section 59 says “reasonable force” (whatever that is) is allowed if it is to prevent harm to the child. So keeping the term “reasonable force” in s59 never actually was an issue. To make sure of that point, subsection 2 of s59 effectively says “whatever reason you used force in subsection 1, is fine, as long as it wasn’t to discipline your child. It remains expressly illegal to discipline your child using reasonable force.

Then we have people saying “you’ll never be sent to court if you smack your child. Excpet that is rapidly changing to the illuminating wisdom of Grrr above. “Don’t smack and you will not have to go to court.”

There is a small group of people fixated on making a smack equivalent to child abuse. Unfortunately, they’ve fooled a lot of people into accepting this equivalence without too much thought, and eventually good parents WILL be punished for something trivial (and there are studies that support this).

Smacking should not be illegal. Child abuse always was. Now the State will concern itself with the trivial so it doesn’t have to face up to the real issues. There has already been a 50% increase in notifications (which the police downplay). Far easier to resolve greater numbers of trivial cases to make the percentages look good, so the serious (real) cases of notified child abuse take on a smaller proportion of the total investigations.

If smacking should be illegal, lets round up the parents of all those that wish to make smacking illegal. We’ll just make sure that none of these people are so damaged by being smacked by their parents that they are rendered incapable of making an informed and unbiased opinion. Hey Grrr, if their parents didn’t smack them they have nothing to fear. Apparently, the process of going to court etc is no big deal, even if you are innocent.