Suffer The Children

My dad's people are from Eufaula, Oklahoma, and thus I swelled with pride when I learned that one of Eufaula's enterprising small businessmen was manufacturing and advertising (in homeschooling magazines) an innovative new parenting product, The Rod:














What, might you say, is this "Ideal Tool for Child Training"?

















That's right, it's a nylon whip for beating your kids.

Here's how the proud Oklahoman who manufactures this pint-sized torture device for the pre-teen set justifies his work in the Boston Globe:

''I'm one of these simple people," (Clyde) Bullock said. ''The Bible is what it is -- I'm not trying to change it. God is right. We have to have faith in that."

But is beating your children with the kind of apparatus usually found in a San Francisco S&M club really a good way to express your heartfelt faith? The most influential Christian leader in America apparently thinks so:

James Dobson, founder of the group Focus on the Family, one of the nation's prominent Christian evangelical organizations, has written about the proper use of spanking for children who willfully disobey parents, sanctioning the use of a "neutral" object such as a paddle in order for the hand to be reserved as "an object of love."

When used ''lovingly and properly," Dobson wrote on his website, corporal punishment is an effective tool to instill discipline and does not bring about lasting emotional damage to a child. "God created this mechanism as a valuable vehicle for instruction," he wrote.

Maybe James Dobson needs a "neutral" object shoved right up his pale white ass, as a "valuable vehicle" for instructing him what it's like to be powerless. Ya know, like a child.

It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.
-Luke 17:2