25 October 2006

EPOCH are making some rather empty claims.

They say there are 60 so-called child and family organisations who are informed when they call for repeal of Section 59. These organisations generally have four things working against them being properly informed: One, they view things from a detached academic and/or institutional view, while those who are at the coalface....parents....have consistently expressed their desire by voting at around 80% in poll after poll to retain Section 59.

Two, they tend to view parents and their children in simplistic, black and white, adversarial caricatures wherein parents are too busy and stressed to understand their children properly and can barely cope and need these children's groups to intervene.

That is, they see parents as the selfish villains who don't have their own children's best interests at heart, and they see themselves as the selfless heroes who have only the child's best interests at heart. Three, they are inordinately paternalistic, telling the vast majority of parents, who they know disagree with their views, how to raise their children. Four, since they know they are vastly outnumbered by ordinary New Zealanders, they want the state to coerce everyone else to adopt their minority views, and then have the audacity to suggest this anti-democratic coercion shows "leadership" by politicians. This makes one suspect they are closet Marxists.

They make the incredulous statement that the purpose of changing the law is education rather than prosecution. This is simply daft. The law does educate, yes, but it only does so by punishing law-breakers. As long as some parents are prosecuted for using reasonable force to correct, train and discipline their children, other parents will learn either to avoid using reasonable force to correct, train and discipline their children, leaving us with a nation full of undisciplined children, or to avoid being noticed by going underground. Isn't it interesting how in these enlightened times, homosexuality and prostitution are no longer criminalized and driven underground, but these pro-repeal of Section 59 groups are keen to criminalise parents and drive them underground?

They expect MPs and others to simply accept their poorly disguised propaganda statement that "Physical discipline does not show children how to behave well." Any parent worth his salt knows that good examples show children how to behave well, that consistent verbal instructions tell children how to behave well, and that physical discipline makes children behave well until such time as they have internalised self-discipline and personal habits of behaving well. It is as if the repeal lobby simply do not understand this basic concept of parenting children.

Countless generations of people from all manner of religious, cultural, ethnic, social, educational and economic backgrounds have testified over time and continue to testify today that physical discipline is essential to the cultivation of good behaviour.

The efforts of EPOCH and other such groups are so paternalistic and ideologically driven that they will criminalise good parents and drive them underground.

ENDS

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