Red Bluff Daily News, ATTN: Letters to the Editor, August 25, 1997

Dear Editor:

I recently returned from a 10-day trip and poured over the editions of the Daily News I’d missed. What a great way to catch up on what happen in our parochial paradise, especially on pages one and three!

I’d like to give thoughts on two seemingly different topics of warming: global and fanny.

I was especially glad to see your August 1 local editorial, "Hot air about global warming." One only has to by Freon for his car air conditioner to see how much science-by-politics costs the little guy.

F. Sherwood Rowland won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his hypothesis of CFC’s destroying ozone, an hypothesis which, according to environmental pariah Dr. Edward Krug, has neither been observed in nature nor in the laboratory. What’s more, according to Lawrence Dawson in "The Death of Reality," any attempts to refute (or test the confirmation of) the CFC hypothesis have met with stern government disapproval, some by Al Gore.

(It’s instructive that Gore had no footnotes in his book. It was emotion, not science.)

But even the Daily News is "guilty" of allowing news wire propaganda to appear unchallenged. On June 23, a small filler article on page 6 by the AP, with dateline United Nations, began:

"Leaders of a world low on water, high on carbon dioxide and growing less green by the day opened a week-long summit today . . ." Wow! Who was the wire service spin-doctor who wrote that line? Hardly an objective reporter methinks.

The article went on to quote first Gore and then a Malaysian diplomat who gave the standard UN party line: "We continue to consume resources, pollute, spread and entrench poverty." The unspoken conclusion is, of course, that our salvation will come by sharing the wealth and having an all-inclusive, "social-justice-type" one-world religion (even National Review has finally got around to finding out about the UN’s Maurice Strong and his New-Age agenda).

Apropos my second point, a lower-front-page banner article last week gave publicity to sociologist Murray Straus, the self-proclaimed crusader against corporal punishment who recently claimed that spanking causes kids to lie, cheat, and disobey.

One should first note that Straus’s (in)famous book against spanking is entitled, Beating the Devil out of Them. Two guesses to his attitudes about religion.

Now, according to Focus on the Family, two pediatricians have pointed out several flaws in Straus’s study: (1) He only studied 6- to 9-year olds; (2) He surveyed mothers whose ages were 14 to 21, hardly mature care-givers; and (3) He didn’t identify the context in which the spankings were given, as in angry retribution vs. well-meted punishment.

I believe Straus has a few good points but is basically wrong, but then again, Straus’s belief in God, if any, is most likely much different from mine. It was instructive to see that in a big article about Strauss in a major psychological publication, perhaps 75% of psychologists still believe in spanking their own children, at least in some instances.

For a well-reasoned defense of corporal punishment, I encourage people to read Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Tedd Tripp.