Well, this goes a long way in explaining why Republicans are so mentally disordered. They're the kids who got thrown against the wall so often by their parents that the repeated impacts permanently scrambled their brains - like a boxer taking too many punches to the head.

Of course they want to enshrine the right of abuse - how else do they pass along what was done to them without fear of jail time?

Isn't it fascinating that when right-wingers speak of "rights", they are invariably speaking of an individual's, or a state's, or some other institution's "right" to mistreat somebody?

If the U.S. Senate ratifies the treaty it then becomes "the supreme law of the land" as dictated by Article. VI. of the U.S. Constitution.

Note to Republicans: Please, don't call this the "Spank the Monkey Freedom Act".

I'd love to see a Right to Spank in the Constitution. Just think of all the guilt it would relieve. :-)

Too bad this article or the one it refers to doesn't link to a list of the 70 cosponsors. What an election issue: "________ comes out in favor of child abuse!"

Note to Republicans: Please, don't call this the "Spank the Monkey Freedom Act".

Thank you, thank you, thank you. No matter what the Replicants call it, this is what I will be calling it. Thank you again.

SPT - Stupid Political Theater! Two thoughts come to mind that are not so good: First, spanking has been the most oft used euphemism in the Western world. Spanking can mean anything from a cold calculated punishment to an emotional outburst that leaves welts, bruises, broken bones and even death for the child. Second, why so many Constitutional Amendments when these Republican representatives allowed their man in the WH to trash the Constitution these past eight years?

Today I look at the Republican party as the symbol of everything that has been wrong here in America for far too long! I believe I am not alone!-Kevo

It's not odd; it's consistent with the far-right meme of a tyrannical judiciary run amok. If it gets enshrined in the Constitution, that makes it harder for "fascist" jurists to tamper with. Somewhere in the hereafter, Terri Schaivo is smiling.

The Constitution was always intended to be a living document. That's why its framers set up a system for amending it in the first place. So in that sense, yes, it is and always has been a rough draft.

That said, the amendments the right is proposing are pretty foolish. But hey, if they want to waste their time on amendments that will never get passed rather than dealing with the multitude of crises facing the nation and the world right now, that's fine with me. They will only continue to prove how ridiculous and useless they are, which can only benefit the progressive agenda in the end.

The reason the Republican'ts continually fight for Constitutional amendments is because they can use the fight to bolster their conservative resume but they never have to worry about it actually happening and they will continue to have something to bitch about. If any of their amendments actually passed, they would probably have to start thinking something like "oh shit, now what do we do".

Frankly, I think that Dems should turn this into a talking point: we're trying to prevent our economy from ruin, the opposition is busy trying to pass constitutional amendments on spanking. Keep the list of 70 and whenever presented with a quote from one of them or placed opposite them on a cable news show, the Dem line should be "Well, my colleague here Joe Blow (R-SC) thinks the most urgent issue of the day is parents' constitutional right to spank. I think that we have more urgent concerns."

Wow, these guys don't have any useful ideas at all, do they? There's a global recession, the worst since 1929. Literally millions of Americans are worried about losing their jobs and their homes. We're possibly on the brink of irreversible global warming. The peak oil event may or may not have happened.

And this idea made it above #100 on their to-do list?! Even if we narrow the list of problems to be solved all the way down to "there's a really popular president yet we have cooties", this was not a master stroke.

Bush wiped his ass with the Constitution for eight years. It's hardly surprising that he redicklican slow mutants in Congress want to scribble their idiotic demands on it.

"...The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child isn't, or at least shouldn't be, especially controversial. In fact, there are a grand total of two countries in the U.N. that have not ratified the treaty -- Somalia and the United States..."

Arghh, me hearties! Shouldn't this be telling us something? The two nations in the world which haven't ratified the treaty have both been ruled by pirates for the last eight years. Hoocoodanode?

It's a shame the "No Child's Behind Left" joke was used to complain about testing policies; if we'd known a spanking joke was coming down the pike maybe we'd have saved it.

More seriously, the Republicans in opposition always propose lots of Constitutional amendments, because it's good theater. It's also fundamentally unserious of them, but that doesn't differ from their philosophy of government anyway.

This bunch of ignoramuses is so far out of touch with reality that they can't even be measured on the sanity meter.

Every day, week, month since the 2008 elections, they are proving that they truly are the ignorant remnant fringe group of a once powerful party.

It's not even like those supposed moderates who still call themselves republicans can run on personal intelligence apart from the republican brand. They vote in a block. There is no 'apart from the brand'.

Republican today can be accurately defined as fringe lunatic.

They did it to themselves. TFB.

The right-wing is painfully aware that they recently lost an important election, and the majority of the country is on the verge of doing things they don't want. If only, they think, there was a way to stop it! And so they fall on the idea of a Constitutional amendment.

Since they have never really understood how our government works, the fact that passing an amendment would be enormously difficult for a marginalized regional party doesn't bother them.

In fact, as some point out above, for some of them, it's not a bug but a feature: they can't blather about it endlessly, with no fear of having to actually DO anything.

The "Spank the Monkey Freedom Act"--how appropriate for the Teabaggers Party!

Those right-wing wackos are into spanking and teabagging!

Ask them why it just happens to be Somalia that has also not ratified that UN Treaty on childrens' rights ...

I hope to have a post up this weekend at TPMCafe on this Amendment, because it is a LOT worse than Steve says -- and Hoekstra merely re-introduced it, it's been floating around for about ten years.

The possible consequences go beyond allowing 'Bible-based Baby Beating' (which, if you read Christian Child abuse rearing manuals is much more than a 'reasonable spanking' -- try these 'age-equivalent' rods the Fugates suggest:

From the time the toddler begins to crawl until about 15 months ("age is no real criteria [sic] -- how large and how stubborn the child is will be the real issue") use a blackboard pointer, a balloon rod, or an eighth-inch dowel rod.

Age 1-2 a "tot rod" -- 3/16" by 24" dowel

2-4 "mob control' -- 1/4" by 24"

4-8 "train or consequences" -- 5/16" by 27"

8-12 "the equalizer" -- 3/8" by 27"

12+ "the rebel router" -- 1/2" by 33"
(The last is the length of, and one third the thickness of, an average major league baseball bat.)

[For background on their quotes, and other horrifying examples, check out this piece I wrote in Oct. 2006.]

But it has a few other consequences in those three innocuous (and awfully written) sentences:
'Teach my kids that gays aren't depraved, hell-bound parasites? That's interfering with my right to 'direct the education and upbringing' of my children. Tell them that evolution is true, ditto. (In fact, since parents -- left or right, atheist or Christian -- could challenge anything a school taught they didn't want their children to hear, there is no way public education could survive, and we'd all be home-schooling.)

I think you would still be able to convict parents of sexual abuse of their children, but you'd first have to establish, legally, that this 'interference' represented 'governmental interest of the highest order' and was 'not otherwise served.'

captaindan: If this Amendment were to be passed, it specifically makes an exception from the 'supreme law of the land' for any treaty that infringes on this 'right.'

And, ericfree, if you want a list of the co-sponsors, go to the politico article and click through to the 'parentsrights.us' site. You'll find the complete list, including the one deluded Democrat, Mike McIntyre of NC. (And sorry zeit, but this gives Bachman the lead now. She signed it, along with Jean Schmidt, Dan Burton, Zach Wamp and other familiar names, but "Our Steve" didn't ... yet.)

I cannot presume to speak for the thoughts of the Founders on any particular issue. But I think it is safe to say that when they icluded provisions for amending the Constitution, they most likely assumed that process would be used for to address more important issues than spanking.

Caligula had his horse. The Republicans have ridiculous constitutional amendments.

It's true. We need a constitutional amendment to protect spanking. And after the spanking . . .

Surely somewhere in here there must be a David Vitter joke, no?

What's most striking about this is that Hoekstra is angling to run for governor of Michigan. So he must calculate that this position won't hurt him in the general election and will help him in the primary. I doubt if he's mistaken, which is to say public opinion in the United States is pretty congruent with this stuff.

Prup: I was just about to post the same site. Did not see it in the Politico article, but found it independently. It's http://www.parentsrights.us/
Sadly, neither of my homestate Repubs are on the list -- yet.
Michigan has always been progressive on labor issues, but conservative socially. Still, can't help but think this will backfire. What's the opposing point -- "U.S. and Somalia, only two sane nations in the world?"

And if we support parental rights to spanking can we at least take away governmental rights to spanking as evidenced by tens of thousands of instances in public schools each year?

But no, I'm afraid I can't support treating children as less deserving of rights than criminals.

These are the same mental defectives who went berserk seeing Taglibani flogging an adolescent girl, which proved how Islam is a pathological culture &c & c&c. On the other hand, nobody listens to jesus until Mister Ouchy comes out of the chiffarobe and pinkens the pert twitching buttocks of their unruly and slyly seductive child-woman.

this push to treat the Constitution as a rough draft strikes me as odd

Conservatives live for hypocrisy and double standards.

Yes, they speak about the "founding fathers" in the same reverent tones that they use for God and Jesus, but at the same time they disagree with half of what the founding fathers stood for.

So what? This is the same group that talks about "God's grand plan", yet although God is supposed to have this infallible, inevitable grand plan they also spend a huge amount of time praying for God to change the details of the plan. They see no contradiction in this.

Nor do they see any contradiction in their whole rapture belief. This is supposed to be an inevitable, fore-ordained event. Yet they somehow feel the need to take actions to help it along (i.e. support Israel's land grab on the West Bank on the grounds that there needs to be a "Greater Israel" as a precondition for rapture -- I swear the Likudnikss invented this crazy idea). And sometimes they even try to block the rapture -- as those who believed that Obama is the anti-Christ did when they voted against him.

Logic and Republicans. Like Oil and Water.

considering that Somalia and the U.S. are the only 2 countries that have not ratified it, says a lot more about the hypocrisy of quite a few of the signatories. At least Somalia and the Republican Administration who refused to sign it, are honest about the fact that they still want to preserve the right to spank their children.

I appreciate honesty.

Apparently Pakistan signed it as well, but the Taliban was able to post a video online where a teenage girl was being whipped for something she apparently did without religious approval.

How about India where they mutilate children so they can beg more easily.

How about all the countries where child labor is still a way of life.

How about Arab countries that don't see anything wrong with wealthy families taking in children from poor debtors and then use them as domestic slaves.

That goes without mentioning all the countries (Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union) where a lot of child porn originates.

I don't agree with the Republican constitutional amendment, but let's see if any of the countries that still have widespread child abuse going on defend their customs and explain why they still saw fit to sign the treaty. Of course pretending none of that happens in their country is not allowed.

I wonder if the Whip wants to be allowed to whip adults as well as children?

"let's see if any of the countries that still have widespread child abuse going on defend their customs and explain why they still saw fit to sign the treaty."

Are you seriously insisting that gvmts that pass laws to fight evil behavior are hypocrites unless they first eradicate all said behavior first? Did it ever occur to you that gvmts pass laws and sign treaties in order to give themselves the tools to fight the evil behavior? Did I just fall for the siren song of an obvious troll?

I know that this issue seems to just beg for satire and mockery, but this is serious shit -- the GOP is doing nothing less than trying to enshrine child abuse in the USConst.

Every one of those 70 co-signers needs to have the label "child abuse enabler" slung around their necks, and every other GOPer needs to be publicly queried as to whether their party is now the pro-child abuse party.

This demonstrates the measure of the right's desperation.

Have they actually read the UN convention the amendment is trying to counteract? It's loaded with respect for parental rights - and responsibilities - which should be a draw for the right. It saves most prohibitions for the state in order to prevent interference with the family. Lastly, the Convention's preamble speaks to "special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, BEFORE as well as after birth."[caps mine] These should be a rally call for conservatives to embrace the Convention rather than oppose it.

About the only thing I can see that conservatives might be concerned with is the prohibition against capital punishment and life with no possibility for parole for those under 18. For some insane reason, the right loves to get tough with minors and try them as adults.

Really people, get a life.

Bob

Have a heart, folks. You've got to feel for these people and what they've endured in the last fifty years or so.

They can't send their kids to all-white public schools anymore. The schools won't lead the kids in prayer when they get there. Instead they try to teach them that they're more or less related to monkeys and, I don't know, banana slugs. Then if you're not careful, they'll be telling them stuff about sex.

All they want to do is preserve the last bastion of family integrity, the right to beat their children.

>> but this push to treat the Constitution as a rough draft strikes me as odd.

NOT odd at all - if you don't think the Constitition should include rights for people you don't like, should only allow "your kind, your way of thinking" be "The Way", then you need to bring about the perception that the Constitution need work, needs "fix'n".

The saying, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' is not relevenat to those who feel that the Constitution is broken because it gives to many Rights to the wrong people.