Fred Martinez's Monitor

Family Autonomy Crushed by Government

Family Autonomy Crushed by Civil Government in Spanish Decision to Ban Spanking

Latest of many blows against the family by socialist government elected in reaction to terrorist bombings

By Peter J. Smith

MADRID, December 21, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Spain's government will no longer permit parents to discipline their own children through spanking after the nation's Congress voted Thursday to rewrite the civil code and ban all corporal punishments.

Previous Spanish law had recognised the rights of parents to "reasonably and moderately correct" their children, but at the behest of the Socialist-led government, Spain's Congress voted to suspend two articles of the Spanish Penal Code permitting corporal punishment by parents and tutors, and warned that parents disciplining children would have to show "complete respect for their physical and psychological integrity."

Delegates of the opposition Popular Party, which lost control of the government in 2004 due to the unpopularity of the US-led war in Iraq and the trauma of the March 11 Madrid train bombings, decried the measure saying it would render parents unable to discipline their children effectively. The Socialist government however defended the new proposal on the basis that it followed recommendations from the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Spain ratified in 1990.

The law is considered by pro-family advocates as the latest crippling blow to the traditional family and parents' rights from the Socialist government led by Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero. Ever since the Spanish electorate ushered the Socialists into power, the government has worked aggressively to deconstruct Spanish family structures and parental authority. The government legalised homosexual "marriage" and adoption in 2005, approved no-fault divorce, and in July 2006 under general secretary for education, Alejandro Tiana, began mandating schools teach the homosexual lifestyle to schoolchildren as young as 10 to emphasise the normalcy of homosexual relationships.

Tiana in that same year admitted the Socialist government was going to dismantle parental authority by saying "the State cannot be given a subsidiary role with respect to families."

However thousands of families are beginning to fight back against the Socialist programme by boycotting the pro-homosexual course "Education for Citizenship and Human Rights." According to the Spanish Family Forum, at least 15,000 "conscientious objections" out of 200,000 students had been officially registered with school authorities by September with more on the way as the provinces were underreported at the time.

posted by Fred Martinez @ 8:00 AM