Spanking Of Children To Be Banned
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For years now, South Africa has refused to allow corporal punishment in schools. This was bad enough. But now, if a new bill is signed into law by President Mbeki, as it looks almost certain to be, parents will no longer be permitted to use corporal punishment in the home! It is the latest assault on parental duties by the ruling ANC/Communist government, and yet another grave threat to Christian parents, who are commanded in the Word of God to discipline their children.
In late May 2007, the Children’s Amendment Bill was passed by the National Council of Provinces. Its purpose was to widen the ban on corporal punishment from schools to the home. The bill will now go back to the National Assembly for approval, before it can be signed into law by the president. The bill states, “No child may be subjected to corporal punishment or be punished in a cruel, inhuman or degrading way.” It adds, “Prosecution of a parent or person holding parental responsibilities and rights… may be instituted if the punishment constitutes abuse of the child.”
This means that if a parent uses corporal punishment in a proper manner to discipline a child, he or she will have no defence available in law.
All decent-minded people would agree with the statement that a child should not be punished in a way that is cruel, inhuman or degrading. Any form of child abuse is to be abhorred, and punished by the civil authorities. Children whose limbs are damaged or broken, or who are burned, or who are whipped across their backs, or who are beaten in any way so badly that they bleed, etc., etc. – such heinous outrages deserve punishment. But these abuses are a very far cry from spanking a child on the bottom. No parent who loves his or her child will abuse them, but every parent who loves his or her child will discipline them: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” (Prov. 13:24). Ever since the human race began, all over the world and in all kinds of societies, corporal punishment has been used by parents to discipline children, and it was understood to be right, just, and necessary. And it worked! Previous generations were better disciplined, more respectful and obedient to parents and to authority in general, and – contrary to what psychologists, those priests of the new religion of psychobabble, have been telling the world for decades now – children in general did not suffer any ill effects from such punishment, they were not “traumatised” and did not grow up hating their parents as a result, or unable to adjust to being parents themselves, or all the other nonsense society has been fed by these false priests. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Just look around at the youth of today. What has psychology unleashed on the world, with its doctrine of anti-spanking? Generations of young people with no discipline, no respect, no decency. We have had decades in which to test the man-made theories of the psychologists; and they have been found, not just wanting, but utterly bankrupt. The world is not a better place since multitudes of parents bought into the child-rearing “wisdom” of so-called “experts” who claim to know better than all the generations of the human race before them, and better than God the Creator Himself.
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