Spanking Illegal In Massachusetts?

Proposed Bill Would Outlaw Corporal Punishment For Children

The measure would prohibit corporal punishment including whipping, spanking and pinching. Also forbidden would be washing a child's mouth out with soap and administering electric shocks.

Those who seek a lack of judgment tend to make associative arguments that blur things in an indiscriminate way. So they lump everything together.

But maybe it is true, eh? I know that when my grandmother washed someone's mouth out with soap she was probably one little step from getting out the electrodes and "administering electric shocks." Yep, it all goes together. Yet I'm surprised that the Leftist nitwits of Massachusetts are not considering a law making "administering electric shocks" to the genitalia illegal too. Because, as you might guess, that is just like any other physical punishment administered to kids.

In related news from Massachusetts,

....students as young as 11 were asked: 'How many oral sex partners have you had.'

...Three boys were charged this week with statutory rape for allegedly asking and receiving oral sex from a 15-year-old girl. Two juveniles boys were also involved. ...

Said one student about the incident: "I think this is something that's typical of high school. We just don't know about it."

(TownOnline)

Massachusetts seems to be following the Europeans and if Europe is any measure it will be illegal to raise kids with any sense of limitation taught through physical cause and effect. Such children seem to feel that the chattering of adults about "safe sex" and so on does not refer anything real to them and cannot touch their physical reality. They are untouchable physically and there will never be a physical consequence for their actions.

This is my attitude about nice parents and the cruelty of their vanity:

I've seen far too many anti-spanking parents who, under a thin veneer of civility, spend the whole day hissing and seething at their children, and end up rearing passive-aggressive basket cases.

Anti-spanking parents like to think of themselves as the child-rearing equivalents of horse whisperers -taming their charges without ever laying a finger on them.

But the horse-whispering method is to tie the horse to a long rope and make it run in circles for hours at an end until the horse, in its confusion and exhaustion, puts itself at the mercy of the whisperer. To me, the idea of psychologically wearing your child out on the end of some conceptual rope seems a far crueller-and, in a queue for "same-day travel" at Victoria Station, unrealistically time-consuming-option than a quick, punitive "one-handed clap".

(The Times (London)
July 5, 2004, Monday
SECTION: Features; 16
HEADLINE: It hurts to say it, but I still believe in smacking
BYLINE: Caitlin Moran)

A broad empirical view:

This meta-analysis investigates differences between the effect sizes of physical punishment and alternative disciplinary tactics for child outcomes in 26 qualifying studies. Analyzing differences in effect sizes reduces systematic biases and emphasizes direct comparisons between the disciplinary tactics that parents have to select among. The results indicated that effect sizes significantly favored conditional spanking over 10 of 13 alternative disciplinary tactics for reducing child noncompliance or antisocial behavior. Customary physical punishment yielded effect sizes equal to alternative tactics, except for one large study favoring physical punishment. Only overly severe or predominant use of physical punishment compared unfavorably with alternative disciplinary tactics.

(Comparing Child Outcomes of Physical Punishment
and Alternative Disciplinary Tactics: A Meta-Analysis
By Robert Larzelere; Brett Kuhn
Clinical Child & Family Psychology
Review. Vol 8(1), Mar 2005, pp. 1-37)