Child abuse by any other name

A friend of mine sent me this link yesterday: http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411419/792057 Can I just say, right here right now for the record, I can't even freaking believe we still even have to have this conversation in the civilized world??? Maybe this is just another in a long, long series of things that proves to me that I and my parenting just don't belong in this culture. Somebody wake me up and send me back to wherever I came from, cause it sure as hell isn't here. In my freaky little fringey world, the primary job of motherhood is physical nurturance, followed by spiritual nurturance, followed by social nurturance. The main thing being, uh, nurturance. It's my job to keep them fed, clothed, sheltered, rested. Attending to the basics until they can take those functions over reliably themselves. It's my job to be my child's best advocate. It's my job to believe the best of them, to attribute positive intent to them until I find out otherwise. Not that I don't blow it, mind you. I get tired and crabby and hungry and pissy and intolerant and impatient and dogmatic just like every other human being. But fifteen solid minutes of beating my own flesh and blood for their tiny little transgressions? That is pathological. There is no other word for it. No sane human being could possibly watch their own child sleep and manage to still deny that the Hand of the Divine rests upon them all. But then again, I also think it's ridiculous to believe that an omnipotent being could be so offended by the sins of us mere mortals. It's precisely the same issue of scale, to my mind. My God does not beat his children, and neither should I. They use the term "smacking", a cute little dimunitization of a word. The word, friends, is CHILD ABUSE, in case you're unclear on the concept. Just like a pedophile is hardly someone who "loves children" as the latin derivation suggests, fifteen minutes of physical abuse is hardly "smacking". But opressors since the beginning of recorded history have managed to get away with lessening the impact of the reporting of their horrors by twisting the language. I suppose the drive to commit physical violence goes deep. I know what I'd do with 15 minutes behind closed doors with one of those goons... not that it would help...