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Opinion

Proposed law will threaten parents' rights

Monica Granger
Opinion columnist  

California assemblywoman Sally Lieber wants to save all the little children of the world -- from their own parents. The bill has not yet been introduced onto the assembly floor, but would make corporal punishment (spanking), hitting or slapping a child under the age of three a criminal misdemeanor punishable by up to $1,000 or one year in jail. 

Lieber's good intentions won't make U.S. children safer, but will make many parents into criminals. Lieber should realize that the law and its enforcement is not always a neutral, benevolent force in society and that it can sometimes do more harm than good. She should leave parents who are not abusing their children to their own child-rearing philosophies.

Lieber claims that she is helping protect children who are easily victimized. She seems oblivious to the idea that jailing or fining a child's parents might cause more harm for the child than a spanking. She also seems oblivious to the fact that all 50 states have laws against child abuse. Lieber's bill, in typical Orwellian double-speak fashion, would take a relatively black and white law differentiating between abuse and not abuse and muddy it by redefining spanking (which by definition does not physically harm a child) as abuse.

Most parents -- and most people in society -- can tell the difference between a spanking intended to correct bad behavior and outright physical abuse. It is difficult for California police to enforce current laws on child abuse. If Lieber's bill passes, an already overburdened California police force must enforce a patently ridiculous law with little expectation of improving society.

Lieber also claims that corporal punishment promotes a violent society. But sociological and healthcare studies have not yet found a clear link between childhood spanking and abusive adult behavior that corrects for the slew of other cultural, behavioral and psychological factors that may cause abusive tendencies in adults. 

Legally, Lieber's bill is a slap in the face to privacy advocates. The enforcement of this bill will almost assuredly end up in the California Supreme Court, if not the U.S. Supreme Court. Griswold v. Connecticut, the case responsible for making the marital relationship one of the Constitutionally-protected "zones of privacy," and its penumbra will be key in such a dispute, as lawyers try to convince the courts that parenting is as distinctly personal and private an endeavor as marriage.

A less emphatic, but still constitutionally grounded argument will come from the first amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion, as the "spare the rod, spoil the child" argument is raised. Religious professionals have typically been outspoken in favor of corporal punishment that does not physically harm children.

Lieber's plans for a vast nanny state may be well-intentioned, but for the thousands of parents who will be deterred from disciplining their children in the way they see fit, she is saying, "I know better than you how to raise your child, and I have access to the state police power to prove it." Lieber's use of the coercive state apparatus to achieve her goals for "The Good Society" is hypocritical at best, and political grandstanding at worst. Maybe Congress should instead pass a law against bullying -- so that our state legislators will leave us alone to live our lives the way our philosophies compel us. 

Send comments to dccampus@mail.uh.edu