Press Release

For Immediate Distribution

Did Mum Really Abuse Us?

Bradford and all those MPs who support repeal of Section 59 are saying that "reasonable force" when used to correct a wayward child should be defined as violence and abuse. Have I really been abusing my eight children for the past 26 years?

Perhaps they are smarter and wiser than my Grandma O'Hara. I mean she had to use a shotgun to blast the first rattlesnake she saw when the darn thing spooked her horse. She graduated from University in 1914, served as a nurse in WWI, weathered The Depression while taking in homeless folks, helped build aircraft in WWII, survived widowhood and a double mastectomy and then was so hardened by it all as to force me to pull weeds in her garden and to force me to eat my greens. I guess she was a bit of a hick compared to our sophisticated Labour and Green MPs. And I guess these MPs know better than I that my mum was actually being criminally violent and abusive to me and my four siblings when she smacked us into line, forcing us to work so hard and to study so much we couldn't fully enjoy the rampant drug use, anti-war protests and promiscuity of our California community of the late 1960s. How could Mum be so mean as to make us become things like a Doctor of Dental Surgery, an Olympic level horse rider and trainer, a Public Relations manager for Apple Computers?

If Bradford's Bill is passed, my children will need to look back upon Mum and Grandma as perverted sickos for forcibly correcting us kids when we cussed, cheated, thieved, beat each other up or failed to cheerfully offer assistance to others. And my wife and I have this quarter-century habit of forcibly correcting our children for the same things. Are we now to become criminals for doing so?

Have 80% of us Kiwis got it wrong? Is it we who are confused? Is it dumb of us to believe that our core job as parents is to correct and discipline our children so that our neighbours can walk through our neighbourhood in perfect safety or call upon us for help at any time? No. The screwy ideology to thoroughly subvert parental authority and make us all into criminals is wrapped up in this Bill and the shoddy propaganda pushing it. Dump Bradford's Bill. Leave Section 59 intact, just as it is.

Craig Smith National Director Family Integrity

www.FamilyIntegrity.org.nz

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