VERBAL SPANKING
The Ottawa Citizen -
February 18, 2002
TORONTO - Last week, Leger Marketing released the results of a poll conducted in January. It seems 70% of Canadians are opposed to the government passing a law that would prohibit parents from spanking their children. The poll came hard on the heels of the Ontario Court of Appeal rejecting yet another attempt by a group called the Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law to criminalize spanking. The real issue isn't spanking, of course, but state control versus parental autonomy: 49.6% of Canadians never spank their children, but still feel that the state has as little business in the nation's nurseries as in its bedrooms.
But the Foundation types have long wanted the state to regulate parenthood. Michael Freeman, a British law professor, argued in 1987 that parents shouldn't have the right to physically punish their children. Any corporal interference, no matter how moderate - a slap, a smack, or even banishing a child to his or her room - should be unlawful. In the same year, a Canadian academic named Marvin Glass published a short essay in the Globe and Mail, arguing that we should license would-be parents. Glass supported his argument by the observation that some people are abominable, even criminal, mothers and fathers. The Globe and Mail illustrated his thesis by a news photo of a lunatic dangling his young son by the legs from a third-storey window in Vancouver.
What the choice of the photograph illustrated, quite inadvertently, was the insidiousness of the argument. Social engineers always try to use people's abhorrence for psychopaths to regulate not just psychopaths, but everyone else. If madmen dangle their children from windows, the rest of us can't have children, unless - well, unless what? It must be unless we agree to all the ideas that statist academics and their friends have about child-raising. Glass made no bones about this in 1987. He quoted, with evident approval, some criteria by which adoption agencies measure prospective parents. For instance, many agencies feel adoptive parents shouldn't be in frail health, believe in physical punishment or have unrealistic expectations for their children. Canadians accept these tests for adoptive parents, Glass argued, so why not accept them for natural parents, too? They may not be perfect tests, but what tests are ever perfect? We license pilots on the basis of less-than-perfect tests.
As for the state denying people a chance for parenthood because they have the wrong politics - well, we'd just have to be vigilant. The onus was on those who oppose licensing, Glass argued, to show that if politically incorrect people are denied a licence, "the dangers ... would outweigh the benefits of eliminating much of the physical and psychological suffering now inflicted upon children by incompetent parents." This was the argument advanced underneath a photograph of a child dangling by its feet. Good luck to anyone who would counter it by a photograph of a bureaucrat denying someone a licence.
It's difficult to argue with people who compare tests for licensing pilots with tests for licensing parents. Such people inhabit not only a different moral universe, but a different logical universe as well. Tests for pilots, perfect or not, are based on measurable criteria. Their general validity is demonstrable in a way that no "tests" for parenting can ever be. This isn't what Glass and his friends believe, though. They think their social ideas amount to a science, as objective as aerodynamics.
My concern is simple. The very tests Glass cited with approval in 1987 would have denied my mother and father the right to have me. My father was a man of 52 in frail health when I was born (though he lived to be 90, as it turned out.) Superb as my parents were, they did consider physical punishment a normal part of raising children. My father not only expected me, quite unrealistically, to become a musician, but bought a Bechstein piano for me when I was three. I don't think his unrealistic expectations caused me any psychological damage. Despite my unlicensable parents, I'm ready to measure my mental equilibrium against that of most progressive intellectuals.
Glass and his soulmates have always relied on images of abused children to sell their programs, but what they really object to is what they call individuals "owning" their children. This seems to stand in the way of their own pet idea, namely that children should be owned by the state.
George Jonas is a Citizen columnist.