David Barton dedicated today’s program of WallBuilders Live to discuss a case in Texas where a woman was convicted of causing injury to a child. “It was her daughter’s grandmother who noticed red marks on the child’s rear end, and took her to Driscoll Children’s Hospital to be checked out,” reports the local NBC affiliate KZTV, saying the mother “plead guilty to the charge after reaching an agreement with prosecutors.” The office of the state’s Attorney General explains that “corporal punishment can be extremely damaging and dangerous, and this is what the law prohibits as abuse,” and local prosecutors and courts have discretion in handling such cases.
Barton argues that a judge had no right to convict her because, he explained, the Bible justifies and even encourages spanking. He claims that if anything parents should spank their children not with their hands but with “belts or hairbrushes, or they can use a paddle or whatever it is,” because “always in the Bible discipline is with a rod, it’s not with a hand.” Barton goes on to say “we do the same thing with horses,” saying spanking children is like beating horses with a rod or crop.
The right-wing pseudo-historian blames evolution as the culprit for the diminishment of spanking, maintaining that the application of evolution already ruined our understanding of the Constitution, science, and history, and is now set to destroy traditional parenting:
Barton: Always in the Bible, discipline is with a rod, it’s not with a hand. ’Cause the hand is supposed to reach out in love, you don’t want kids flinching from your hand. We do the same thing with horses. When I reach my hand to the face of a horse, I don’t want to flinch him from my hand. So if I have to beat a horse, and occasionally I do, you take something like a switch or a little crop or something else. And you can’t hurt a horse, I mean you can, but you have to convince a 1,200 lbs horse that me at 150 lbs is tougher than you and you do that by training. But when I extend my hand to my horse he doesn’t run from my hand, now he may not like that crop if he sees it, but after he’s had it a few time he’ll do exactly what I want, we have no difficulty, that’s why you also use spurs at times.
So the deal with spanking with hands, that’s why you really don’t want to do that you want to use something else so your hand is always associated with love and tenderness and reaching out to kids, there’s nothing to flinch, so people use belts or hairbrushes, or they can use a paddle or whatever it is.
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When you say something ‘your yea’s should be yeas, your nay’s nays,’ say something, if they don’t follow through, no anger needed, there’s just a penalty to pay for it. A consequence.
So, you get this thing where we have now moved into applying evolution to parenting. Now we’ve already applied evolution to the Constitution, we’ve applied evolution to science, we’ve applied evolution to history, that’s why we don’t teach history, we teach culture. Not any of the of the fifty major universities in America, elite universities require any course in history, they all teach culture, not history. So we’ve applied evolution. Now we’re applying evolution to parenting, and ‘you don’t spank.’
Wait a minute, the Bible says I do. You mean we evolved past the Bible? That’s what you getting. As you can tell I’m exercised over this one.
