WARNING
This diary contains references to child abuse. Do NOT read if this will trigger. I personally find these books and authors repulsive, but this sort of horror needs to be dragged into the light and exposed for what it is.
Peace -
Ellid
My father was naturally left handed.
This is nothing particularly unusual or notable today. Being left-handed is not the norm, but it's scarcely a handicap or a liability in normal life. There are left-handed scissors, left-handed notebooks, left-handed kitchen equipment, calligraphy equipment, even left-handed pens and sewing supplies. Being left-handed can even be an advantage in certain field, like art (where some of the very best are lefties, from Renaissance legend Michelangelo to cartoonist Bill Maudlin) or sports (where a left-handed relief pitcher can all but write his own ticket).
This was not necessarily true in the 1920s. Dad, the only child of an upper-middle class family in a small, exclusive borough called Edgewood, had plenty of everything a small boy could desire: a nice house, loving parents, riding and tennis lessons, a good camera, summers at Conneaut Lake, plenty of toys and a good education. He even had his own white dinner jacket, which he wore for a carefully posed picture where he sits calmly in a chair, hair slicked like an adult's, looking calm and poised and surprisingly beautiful for a thirteen year old boy.
The one thing Dad didn't have was acceptance of his handedness. Being a lefty was considered a disadvantage at best, a true liability at worst. Some people even considered it not a rare but natural part of the human condition, but a sign of poor character or worse. And since Dad was a child of privilege, from a well off and respectable family, this would not do.
I have no idea whether my grandparents were behind the campaign to switch Dad's handedness that began when he entered grade school, but almost from the day he began his educational career, the teachers would not let him use anything but his right hand for any but the simplest tasks. If he reached for something, picked up a pen, gripped a tennis racket, picked up a toy or a book - if he used his left hand, he would be disciplined, either with a verbal reminder or a light smack across the knuckles with a ruler. That he was naturally left handed, that his left side was more coordinated, stronger, better able to manipulate objects, than his right, did not matter. Being left-handed was not acceptable, period.
Dad did eventually conform. His handwriting was never good, and he was always more coordinated on the left than the average, but by the time I was born it was impossible to tell that he was a lefty who'd been forced to switch to his right hand. Ironically enough, I turned out to be very, very right-dominant, to the point that I would be seriously crippled if something happened to my right arm…which means that, if modern brain research is to be believed, the left side of my brain is the stronger and more developed. Go figure.
This experience, humiliating and occasionally brutal, may have been why Dad did not believe in corporal punishment. I may or may not have been an exceptionally well behaved child - I was probably pretty average - although having two teachers who knew how keep good order in a classroom certainly didn't hurt when it came to dealing with an extroverted, overly intelligent child.
The one exception was when I was in the second grade. I had always been precocious, but that was the year it became obvious that I was much, much brighter than my classmates. I was already reading at the junior high level, had a vocabulary to match, and was far more comfortable around adults or college students than my age mates. I zipped through my textbooks in the first few weeks of school without prompting, and was thereafter thoroughly bored with my lessons, my classmates (the girls played with Barbies and played silly games like Mystery Date, and the boys were just icky), and my teacher (a nice enough woman who had no idea how to handle me, and wasn't too pleased about it).
It was not a good situation, and after the teacher sent home notes about how I was goofing off in class and flunking tests because I thought they were stupid, well, something had to be done. Mum tried cajoling, revocation of privileges, and - horror of horrors - taking away my books, but I was nothing if not stubborn. I wasn't happy, wasn't paying attention, and my grades continued to slip.
And so, at her wits' end, Mum asked Dad to discipline me when he got home from work.
Dad was clearly not happy about this; I don't remember exactly what he said, but I will never forget the solemn, clearly unhappy tone in which he said it. And then, while I pleaded for mercy, he turned me over his knee, lifted up my skirt, and administered two good hard smacks to my little seven year old gluteal region.
I let out a wail and started crying as hard as I've ever cried in my life. Dad took a deep breath, placed me on the sofa, and got up. I burrowed into the cushions, still sobbing at the pain and the awful, aching realization that not only had I disobeyed my parents, I had somehow hurt them.
Dad walked very slowly into the dining room. Mum, clearly upset, said something I couldn’t hear above my tears. Dad's reply, deep and quiet and delivered in a tone that brooked no argument, was another matter entirely:
"Martha. I will never spank that child again."
And he never did.
As traumatic as my first and only spanking was for everyone involved, it did have one good outcome: I stopped goofing off in class, applied myself even though I wasn't overly fond of either my teacher or my textbooks, and was soon back at the top of my class. I had trouble with fifth grade math (try going from a progressive district that taught New Math and used the SRI reading program to one with textbooks that would have been inadequate in1950 and see for yourself) but was never in serious academic danger after that. So one could say that corporal punishment did work for me as a last resort.
Note that I said "last resort."
The two books I bring tonight do not agree with my parents. Examples of discipline that goes beyond old-fashioned to verging on the sadistic, they are wildly popular with right-wing evangelical Christians, the sort who believe in the inerrancy of the King James Bible, the evils of godless Darwinism, and the necessity of a stern patriarch at the head of every family. Worse, they have caused untold psychological and physical damage to those raised according to their precepts, sometimes to the point of maiming or even death. One is written by a woodsy patriarch with a peculiar hobby, while the second is by a man who applied his own warped version of discipline to the family pet:
To Train Up A Child, by Michael Pearl - Michael Pearl is a man of many talents. The patriarch of a large family, he is an author of several bestselling books of family and marriage advice for conservative Christian families, and minister to a small but fervent congregation primarily consisting of his descendants. He is also a champion knife and tomahawk thrower, surely skills that come in handy when it comes to preaching the word of the Lord.
Despite all these worthy skills and honors, Michael Pearl is best known to the non-Christian world for his advocacy of a peculiar method of disciplining - excuse me, "training" - children from infancy to adulthood.
Pearl, born in 1945 and a proud graduate of Victory University (known formerly as Crichton College or Mid-South Bible College), an educational institution founded in 1944. This worthy entity, now headed by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, was not yet accredited when the future author entered into the early 1960s, but it was still good enough, and faithful enough to Scripture, that young Michael found it more than suited to his spiritual and educational needs.
Following graduation, he married his wife Debi, went to work for the Union Mission in Memphis, and set to work plowing and planting among the fallen souls of that wicked, wicked city of blues, barbecue, and Elvis Presley souvenirs. He also began plowing and planting the seeds that became the arrows for his godly patriarchal quiver by fathering five children by his faithful wife, all of whom (or which) were raised to be quiet, obedient, and God-fearing almost from the moment they emerged bawling and bloody into this world of pain and Satanic influences.
"By their fruits ye shall know them," as the Bible says, and the Pearls, primarily Michael (the patriarch, as commanded by Scripture) with assistance from his faithful helpmeet Debi, were determined that their fruits would be such as to display to the world their godliness and faithful adherence to Biblical precepts when it came to their brood. That their methods were, perhaps, a bit harsher than one might expect from followers of a man who said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me" was a surprise only to the unsaved and the permissive; the Pearls' children (and their children, nineteen and counting as of 2011) were model Christians, so clearly they were doing something right.
Alas, their success only made the wickedness, bad behavior, and Satanic tastes of other people's children for such evils as television, video games, and non-Christian books, movies, science texts, clothing, etc., more marked. And so, after thought, prayer, and plenty of communications with other families that believed in salvation rather than sin, the Pearls felt called to write down their advice for parents. They claimed great success for their methods, and eager Christian parents, most of whom had to raise their children in a world that simply did not understand that children were born depraved and had to encouraged to repent of their manifold sins about the time they stopped imbibing wisdom along with their mother's milk, were more than happy to plunk down their money despite the Pearls' complete lack of any training in childcare or child psychology.
The rest of the world, sunk in sin and despair, was not nearly so pleased by the advice contained in To Train Up A Child. Why this might be so is best known only to the Prince of Lies and his fallen followers, but the following may help those who have not seen the light to understand:
- Discipline and adherence to the parents' word in all things is imperative lest the child become a "hardened, hedonistic heathen" by the ripe old age of three.
- Children who resist toilet training should be given cold baths, regardless of age.
- Disobedient children should denied food.
- Children should never be struck by the parents' hands (which should be reserved for loving touch), but the use of a "little instrument" such as a rubber spatula, "light wooden spoon" (presumably light in weight, not color, although this is not specified), quarter-inch plumbing line, "or any instrument that will cause an unpleasant sting without leaving any marks" is perfectly fine.
- Such discipline can begin as early as six months.
That's right: to keep a child respectful, obedient, and ready to receive the word of God, it's incumbent upon a loving parent to begin whacking him or her with kitchen instruments or plumbing line before they're weaned. Michael Pearl believes that children must be trained “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules,” and if that means the occasional (or more than occasional) use of physical training methods that make the child scream in pain, so be it. That this is to begin well before the average child can talk, let alone understand why Daddy is imitating Lash LaRue with a PVC tube because Junior wasn't coordinated enough to avoid knocking over a glass of orange juice, or wasn't mature enough to make it to the potty chair in time, doesn't matter.
And why should it? After all, the point isn't happy children. It's obedient children, ones who obey their father (and, one hopes, their mother) as they would obey the Lord. Anything less disrupts not only family life, but the Biblical family model of the all-wise patriarch, the meek and fecund matriarch, and the well-scrubbed, well-behaved, perfectly disciplined children who will need no prompting in abjuring Satan's works and giving their souls to God. As the Pearls themselves put it a few years ago,
We do not teach “corporal punishment” nor “hitting” children. We teach parents how to train their children, which sometimes requires the limited and controlled application of a spanking instrument to hold the child’s attention on admonition. Over 1,000,000 parents have applied these Biblical principles with joyful results.
Needless to say, the secular world, entrapped in darkness, does not necessarily agree that successful childrearing requires the use of a 15" long PVC tube to "hold the child's attention on admonition" despite the huge sales (over 640,000 since 1994) of
To Train a Child. In many quarters,
To Train A Child, which has become a classic how-to manual among homeschooling and home churching households, is seen as little more than a how-to manual for child abuse.
This may be due to Satanic delusions, well meaning but timid parents, or lack of parental will...or perhaps it's because of the inconvenient, disturbing, but unfortunately true fact that more than one child trained up using the Pearls' guidebook has been trained up straight into an early grave.
That's right. At least three deaths, one of an adopted child from Ethiopia, another of an adopted child from Liberia, have occurred in families that used the Pearls' methods to discipline their little darlings. One family, the Williamses, not only used the quarter-inch plumbing line on their six biological and two adopted children (“It’s too light to cause damage to the muscle or the bone," according to Michael Pearl), but hosed down any of their brood who failed at potty training, denied food to punish infractions by their daughter Hana, and made her sleep outside in an unheated barn despite spending the first decade of her life in a much hotter climate. The other family, the Schatzes, evidently alternated praying for their daughter Lydia and beating her with the allegedly harmless plumbing tube until she died of "severe tissue damage."
That both of these children might not have understood enough English to know what was required of them does not seem to have occurred to either set of God-fearing parents.
The Pearls, horrified by the deaths, immediately pointed out that their book explicitly warns parents against excessive force, or striking in anger. Further, they told outsiders that not only did members of their little congregation train their children with willow switch, "light wooden spoon," or plumbing line with no ill effects, their own daughter, Shosanna Easling, only had to be spanked 50 times as a toddler before becoming a tractable, obedient child. Best of all, Shosanna, now an adult, claims that she only remembers being spanked a couple of times, and that she is so satisfied with her upbringing that she is now applying these methods to her own children.
Most important of all, though, the Pearls are convinced that they are doing nothing more than obeying God's will. “To give up the use of the rod is to give up our views of human nature, God, eternity,” they say, and what secular humanist can argue with such conviction?
Dare to Discipline, by James Dobson - James Dobson once fought his dog.
It was an epic battle, both physical and mental. Siggie, named for Sigmund Freud, insisted on sleeping in an area that Dobson, psychologist, bestselling author, and conservative activist, had declared off-limits. Worse, when Dobson attempted to discipline his pet, Siggie resisted.
This could not be borne; Dobson, a strong believer in discipline, whether over children or dumb beasts, knew that if he allowed Siggie to get his way when it came to where he laid his fuzzy little head, the next thing he knew Siggie would be running the household instead of showing proper deference to his master. As Dobson himself described it in his book The Strong Willed Child:
The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me "reason" with Mr. Freud.
What developed next is impossible to describe. That...dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand.
Leaving aside the curious question as to how Siggie could possibly have engaged in “swinging [a] belt” when he lacked opposable thumbs (not to mention how a battle between a man and a dog could compare, say, to one between a man and a raging Bengal tiger, charging rhinoceros, or other large, angry, non-domesticated beast), this is quite a passage. One has to ask just what breed Siggie to require such an expenditure of time, energy, vocalizations, leather, etc.
The answer: a miniature dachshund.
No, you not reading this incorrectly: “the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast” was between a 200 pound adult male and a dog roughly the size and shape of a Hickory Farms Beefstick. Dobson himself admits that the only reason he eventually bent Siggie to his will was because he outweighed the poor thing 200 to 12, which frankly doesn't speak well either to his fighting skills or his ability to train an animal with a brain roughly the size of a golf ball. That this smacks more of bullying than effective discipline, or that Siggie might have been more inclined to obey a master who treated him kindly instead of flogging him, does not seem to have occurred to the man Time once called the most influential evangelical Christian in America.
Regardless, it should not surprise anyone that James Dobson believes in physical force to impose his will on his subordinates. A trained psychologist who formerly was on the faculty of the USC medical school until his books started to sell, he has used this credential to back up his belief that disobedient children should be treated just like disobedient dogs.
That the worthy Dr. Dobson should believe in strongly traditional, strongly conservative principles should not surprise anyone; the son of a Nazarene preacher, he is a strong advocate for “traditional marriage” (breadwinner father, homemaker mother) and the "ex-gay" movement that supposedly "heals" homosexuality, is opposed to pornography, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage, and in favor of student-led Christian prayer in public schools. He's the founder of Focus on the Family, an ultra-conservative lobbying and educational group associated with the Dominionist movement that seeks to "claim dominion" over the United States and impose a theocracy in the name of Jesus.
Focus on the Family and Dobson's other major group, The Family Research Council, destroy enormous quantities of trees and buy up large blocks of airtime to promote their founder's message of an America redeemed from its foolish belief in religious, personal, and sexual freedom and remade as an orderly patriarchal paradise. Adviser to presidents and parents, evangelist who brought Ted Bundy to repentence mere days before the killer of at least thirty women and girls was executed, Fox News commentator, host of "Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk," this man among men lives what he teaches, with a half-century long marriage, two successful children, and plenty of grandchildren.
Why this committed Christian named his daughter after Danae, lover of Zeus and mother of Perseus, is unknown; he led a protest a few years ago against a diversity video starring such subversive secular figures as Spongebob Squarepants, but I guess if your personal salvation is secure you can name your kid after a rape victim who bears Zeus's illegitimate child.
Regardless of this peculiar lapse from rock-ribbed conservative Christianity, Siggie's conqueror has had an enormous and largely unacknowledged effect on American life and politics. He and his followers have been instrumental in the Republican Party's swing to the right on social issues, to the point that his statement that John McCain wasn't conservative enough to earn his vote in 2008 was seen as evidence that the Republican hold on evangelical Protestants was slipping. Not only that, he authored one of the most unintentionally hilarious, and least accurate, predictions of the 2008 election; his "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America" painted a portrait of an emasculated America that had undergone the following drastic, horrible changes in only four short years:
- Mandated teaching of homosexuality in the schools (?)
- The banning of firearms in whole states (yeah, right)
- The dissolution of the Boy Scouts (??)
- The abolition of home schooling and Christian clubs in public schools (what was he smoking?)
- The outlawing of Christian adoption agencise and radio programs (from his keyboard to God's ears...)
- Primetime pornography on network television (whatever he was smoking, can I have some?)
- Bonuses for gay soldiers (BWAHAHAHA!)
- Terrorist atttacks on American soil (presumably against something besides abortion clinics)
- Nuclear bombs falling on Tel Aviv (checks map to confirm that Tel Aviv is still there)
- Russia conquering Eastern Europe (checks calendar to confirm that it's 2013, not 1946)
- The end of healthcare for anyone over 80 (say what?)
- Skyrocketing gas prices (compared to Europe?)
- The complete destruction of the American economy (looks in vain for signs of Hoovervilles)
Dobson also claimed that President Obama, doting father of two beautiful little girls, supports infanticide, would be responsible for the deaths of millions of fetuses (????), and would "appoint the most liberal justices to the Supreme Court...that we've ever had."
I haven't been so frightened since the last time I saw that all-time horror classic, Dr. Tongue's House of Pancakes.
All of this power, this punditry, this prescience, stems from James Dobson's credentials as a child psychologist who advocates the sort of stern, unyielding patriarchal authority that one might expect from a man who would devote so much time to beating his wiener dog. Dare to Discipline, one of his earliest and still best selling books, was originally written in the early 1970s, when anarchy ruled on college campuses and desperate parents were being sassed by lazy, dirty, disrespectful little hippies. The solution, based on Dobson's study of Scripture and dressed in a smattering of terminology borrowed from his academic career, was simple: corporal punishment.
Now, this doesn't mean actually beating your little darling, oh no. "Corporal punishment should not be a frequent occurrence," nor should it "be harsh and destructive to the child's spirit." At the same time, it should be "of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely," at least for a minute or two. Longer bouts of tears are actually a sign of defiance reasserting itself and should be dealt with according, but a minute or two of pain-fueled sobs is just fine, and will help teach Junior or Janie that Papa means business when he tells them to eat their vegetables.
This will in time produce tractable, biddable, disciplined children who will never talk back, smoke a joint or whatever wacky weed Dobson was indulging in when he wrote his letter from the future, or utter a discouraging word.
That sociologists have found not a single scrap of evidence to support this good old-fashioned view matters not a whit. Doesn't the Bible say "spare the rod and spoil the child"? And didn't Dobson's own children turn out just fine, even if one of them has a really, really unbiblical name? Besides, a little old-fashioned discipline never hurt anyone; Dobson's mother, a good Christian woman who was a loving wife and mother, hadn't hesitated to apply physical discipline when necessary:
My own mother had an unusual understanding of good disciplinary procedures. She was very tolerant of my childishness, and I found her reasonable on most issues...But there was one matter on which she was absolutely rigid: she did not tolerate “sassiness.” She knew that back talk and “lip” are a child’s most potent weapons of defiance, and they must be discouraged. I learned very early that if I was going to launch a flippant attack on her, I had better be at least ten or twelve feet away. This distance was necessary to avoid being hit with whatever she could get in her hands. On one occasion she cracked me with a shoe; at other times she used a handy belt. The day I learned the importance of staying out of reach shines like a neon light in my mind. I made the costly mistake of “sassing” her when I was about four feet away, She wheeled around grab something with which to hit me, and her hand landed on a girdle. She drew back and swung that abominable garment in my direction, and I can still hear it whistling through the air. The intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps and buckles, wrapping themselves around my midsection. She gave me an entire thrashing with one massive blow!
and didn't he turn out just fine?
I mean, who wouldn't want to convert a serial killer, sell millions of books, predict the end of the world as we know it, and assert his manhood over a 12 pound dog?
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So, my friends...what say you? Were you ever left handed? Did you ever own an obstreperous dachshund? A James Dobson book? Were you tempted to throw the book at the wall with extreme prejudice? Beat it with a belt? We're all friends here, so come and share....
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