Turns out there was a law professor behind the idea (Jan. 22):
As for what sparked [Assemblywoman Sally] Lieber’s decision to introduce a bill about spanking, it wasn’t a rash of emergency room visits from 3-year-olds with sore bottoms. The San Jose Mercury News, which first reported the no-spanking story, wrote that Lieber “conceived the idea while chatting with a family friend and legal expert in children’s issues worldwide.” That friend was University of San Francisco Law School professor Thomas Nazario, who fiercely opposes corporal punishment. “It was my idea and I was primarily responsible for coming up with the final draft,” he explains. (Which makes Lieber sound more like Nazario’s pawn than a legislative leader, but I digress.)
(Eilene Zimmerman, “Spanking mad”, Salon, Feb. 5). WryMouth (Jan. 29) has an account of Prof. Nazario’s appearance on the popular Los Angeles radio show “John & Ken” to discuss the idea. Orange County Register columnist Steven Greenhut writes: “I don’t advocate spanking as a rule, but it seems rather harsh to rip a child out of a happy home and put him in some nightmare foster-care scenario and put a parent in jail for doing something that has been widely practiced through the history of parenting.” (“Lawmaker deserves a spanking”, Jan. 28).
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This law will be mainly enforced during custody battles, and will languish in obscurity otherwise. Number of spankings stopped: 0
Yet another case where every part of the supposed remedy is far worse than the “problem” supposedly being fixed, even if one believes spanking to be bad.
The black community relies on this perfectly acceptable method of discipline, at all economic levels.
Pediatrics. 2004 May;113(5):1236-41.Discipline in the African American community: the impact of socioeconomic status on beliefs and practices.
One guess upon whom such a law would fall like a ton of bricks.