Reply #16: They should be kept away from helpless people and animals.

[Judi Lynn]

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No Greater Joy Ministries

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http://www.nogreaterjoy.org/

Meet the Pearls
http://www.nogreaterjoy.org/who-is-ngj/meet-the-pearls/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thursday, May 25, 2006 06:00 PDT
Spare the quarter-inch plumbing supply line, spoil the child
Saying no to "timeouts," some fundamentalist Christians "train up" their children by carefully hitting them with switches, PVC pipes and other "chastening instruments."
By Lynn Harris

~snip~
While the Pearls are well known in fundamentalist Christian circles, they were largely unknown to the secular world until March, when their discipline methods were tied to the death of a North Carolina boy and the alleged abuse of two of his siblings. As reported by Mandy Locke of the Raleigh News & Observer, the children's adoptive mother, Lynn Paddock, 45, a devotee of the Pearls' teachings, is currently behind bars. She is charged with first-degree murder in the death of 4-year-old Sean, who suffocated when wrapped tightly in blankets, reportedly to keep him from hopping out of bed. She is also charged with felony child abuse in connection with welts found on two of Sean's other five siblings. Nowhere in the Pearls' book do they advocate restraining with blankets; however, Sean's siblings had apparently been struck with a particular type of "rod" recommended by the Pearls: a length of quarter-inch plumbing supply line.

Paddock's attorney, Michael Reece, confirmed to Salon that Paddock owned "To Train Up a Child" and was a devotee of the Pearls' teachings. He maintains that Sean's death was accidental and that there's a difference between corporal punishment -- which he acknowledges may be "unpopular" -- and abuse. And actually, Paddock's connection to the Pearls may serve as part of Reece's defense of his client. "She's following a recognized philosophy even if it's not a mainstream one. The only one who advocates the PVC pipe is Pearl, " he says. "You can pull a switch off a tree all day long. There's no other reason to buy a PVC pipe -- that's clearly from him."

For the Pearls and advocates of Christian child "training," obedience is next to godliness. For their detractors, fellow Christians and home-schoolers among them, corporal punishment is akin to child abuse -- and to them, the Paddock case proves it. ("Christian," here and throughout, indicates fundamentalist or evangelical Protestants.) Outrage sparked by the case has fired up the blogosphere, bringing impassioned new attention to what is actually not an entirely new debate. Parents, religious and otherwise, have argued the merits and dangers of spanking since the invention of children. When it comes to physical "training" as essential to "biblical" child-raising, the Pearls are neither pioneers nor renegades; for fundamentalist Christians, corporal punishment -- or, as the Pearls prefer, "chastisement" -- is neither a fresh nor a fringe concept. But what's clear is that today, the controversy over biblical child-rearing is more than a family matter. Especially to its supporters, child "training" is yet another battleground in the culture wars.

As the Pearls, their advocates, and supporters of similar Christian parenting approaches appear to see it, child "training" serves, in part, as a bulwark against "modern," liberal, secular, permissive, "child-centered" parenting -- the touchy-feely stuff of timeouts that, they suggest, spoils children into believing in a boundary-free world that revolves around them. "Pearl and others in their camp associate permissive parenting and the assumed moral laxity that it produces with non-biblical, humanist or naive understandings of human nature. It's 'us,' the true believers, against 'them,' the secularists and anyone else who has fallen under their influence," says Mark Justad, senior lecturer in religion and society and executive director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture at Vanderbilt University. "It's all part of the larger picture of returning our whole culture to godliness." Or at least preserving godliness in one's own family, safe from the "crusade" launched by "spanking abolitionists," safe from the influence of the corrupt, and corrupting, secular world.

More:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/05/25/the_pearls/