In February, Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times mocked the Kansas state legislature for considering a Democrat’s proposal to protect parents who spank their children from investigations for child abuse. Placing the proposal alongside a measure designed to protect business owners from being sued for discrimination for declining to cater to gay marriages, she said Kansas was “trying hard to legislate the past back into existence.”
If that is so, California’s liberal Supreme Court is not too far behind.
As the Contra Costa Times reports, the court declined to hear an appeal of a decision “that found using a wooden spoon for a spanking that seriously bruises a child is not necessarily child abuse.” Only one judge voted to hear the case, in which a woman had been reported to the Santa Clara County Department of Social Services for inadvertently bruising her child.
It’s customary for Californians of a certain political stripe to join East Coast elites in looking down their noses at “flyover country,” which includes much of their own state.
Yet perhaps, after the California Supreme Court decision, journalists might hesitate before such lines as: “Fortunately, Kansas children will probably be spared this wrongheaded law. But how will the reputation of Kansas fare? Oh, I think this is gonna leave a mark.”
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