This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me

• I'm guessing that your personal experiences tell you corporal punishment works
  • you may have experinced it yourself and know it cause you to moderate your behavior
  • you may have been involved with its administration and seen it effect
  I'm also guessing your personal experiences tell you that the negative effects of corporal punishment are short-lived or non-existent This is consistent with the reports I have been sharing with you
  • Not everybody who is spanked experience negative effects You cannot tell who will experience the negative effect until well after corporal punishment has been administered
  instinctually know it's wrong to hit people
  • nobody takes pleasure in spanking, i hope
  • you do it because its better than the alternative - people without self-discipline
  there is a lot of evidence that there are alternatives to corporal punishment that have all of the benefits but none of the risks Again, we call on the Leeds City Schools to remove it's policy allowing corporal punishment

People who hit children should go to jail

"People who hit children should go to jail," wrote my wife on the "consent to administer corporal punishment" form.  That unambiguous statement started us down a path to where I am now: figuring out how to convince five Alabamians that corporal punishment is a bad idea.

Things really got started when Wendy posted a snapshot of that note to Facebook.   It was then that she realized that many people, especially people in Alabama, still thought that corporal punishment is a good thing. 

From there we wound up on a New York Times blog, the Huffington Post, discussed on Fox News, and then interviewed by the local CBS station.

Wendy started a petition during all this, trying to urge every elected official she could think of to pass a Federal law banning corporal punishment in schools.  She made the mistake of reading the comment sections of the various places where the articles appeared.   And I got nominated to address the school board on this issue.

I've spoken in front of them twice now.   I plan to keep doing so every board meeting until at least the end of the year (or at least until they change their policy).

This blog is where I will record the steps I go through in this process and any lessons the art of persuasion I learn along the way.