Yeah, That'll Work...and Ultrarunning

Via our friends at Boing Boing, this bit of insanity:

A Kansas lawmaker has introduced a bill allowing parents, caregivers, and school officials to give harder spankings. The Sunflower State is already one of 20 (mostly Southern) states in which children can be hit as long as no mark or bruise remains afterward, but this proposed law would protect adults who strike kids forcefully enough to cause redness or discoloration. The woman behind the measure is Wichita’s Gail Finney, a Democrat and mother of three sons. She outlined her objectives for the Wichita Eagle: to define corporal punishment for the judicial system, to restore parental rights, and to shield old-school disciplinarians from child abuse charges. “What’s happening is there are some children that are very defiant and they’re not minding their parents, they’re not minding school personnel,” Finney said. Even with “a small amount of a bruise, a parent could still be charged with child abuse when it wasn’t anything serious.”

Says Boing Boing:  

The research on hitting children is pretty clear: it doesn't work. The bill would allow teachers and administrators to hit children, even those over 18, with permission from their parents -- legalizing the restraint and violent assault of a legal adult by a government agent. 

 

So, if I get this right, the "thinking" is that if you hit a defiant kid--harder now than formerly--that'll somehow make them less defiant.  Yeah, that'll work.  Instilling the fear o' God and all that stuff.

 

What might work better would be to take said defiant child and challenge him or her to work out their aggression and angst on the trails.  It certainly works for me whenever I am feeling anti-social.

 

And while we are bashing on Kansas, another legislator has come up with this equally hateful idea under the guise of "protecting the institution of marriage."  But making hate lawful by cloaking it in religious terms is still hate:

The bill passed by the Kansas House of Representatives today has a bland title-"An act concerning religious freedoms with respect to marriage." But the language cannot conceal the vicious discrimination it's intended to protect. The bill would allow not only private businesses but, quite remarkably, state officials to withhold services from gays and lesbians as long as it is motivated by a "sincerely held religious beliefs of the individual or religious entity regarding sex or gender." This reprehensible proposed law would render gays and lesbians second-class citizens in Kansas and deprives them of rights most people have long taken for granted. 

The law allows private business to deny gays and lesbians "services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges" based on their sexual orientation. By granting immunity to anyone who denies services to gays and lesbians based on an asserted religious belief, it would prevent gays and lesbians from suing even based on common-law rights that require public accommodations to accept all comers on equal terms. The law is not even limited to same-sex couples, but permits the denial of services to anyone "related to, or related to the celebration of, any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement." Rather than extending civil-rights protections to gays and lesbians, the Kansas law would move the state in the opposite direction, diminishing the civil rights of gays and lesbians (and, possibly, straight people with gay and lesbian friends as well).

You should go read the entire article.  And maybe avoid Kansas if you can.