TEXAS PADDLING AGAINST THE CURRENT

"Corporal punishment is unlawful in federal prisons, but it's still allowed at schools in some 20 states, including Texas where one town has brought back the paddle, the Washington Post reports. A blue-collar community of 60,000 people, Temple, Texas, banned paddling six years ago only to revive its use in the town's 14 schools last May after a unanimous board vote. Parents supported the measure, and in fact encouraged the school board to reconsider the paddling policy because many Temple parents who paddle their children at home wanted consistent discipline in the classroom.

"We're rural central Texas," Temple's assistant superintendent of administration for schools, John Hancock, told the Post's Michael Birnbaum. "We're very well educated, but still there are those core values. Churches are full on Sundays... this is a tool we'd like in the toolbox for responding to discipline issues." Temple school board president Steve Wright claims that behavior at the town's lone high school has improved dramatically since paddling made its return. Fear of the paddle is as much a disciplinary deterrent as the controlled beating itself, some Temple residents argue."
Mother Jones

The left wing media and blogosphere, along with Fox and Friends this morning, is awash in fear and indignation over the very idea that paddling kids is allowed in Texas schools. I'm thinking all these hand wringing pundits might need to be bent over the desk themselves.

I've been a child that got spanked, a parent that spanked and a grandparent that reserves the possibility of spankings. It's not the spanking that keeps a kid in line, it's the threat. It's the embarrassment of it.

Spanking is like the death penalty. It's a deterrent. Done properly it's all sound and fury with very little pain.

For some kids spanking is the only thing that gets their attention. I know because I was one of them. It doesn't damage anyone's psyche and, truth be told, is far less damaging than pumping the kids full of drugs, lies and distortions the way so many schools do today in their effort to indoctrinate the kids into our brave "New World Order".