Those of you who have been to my YouTube have no doubt which side of the corporal punishment debate I firmly stand on...especially after my blog "How to Properly Spank a Child" went up. (There's only ever been one post in that blog, though, and if you have a sense of humor it's definitely worth a read.)

To those of you who throw 3,500-year-old quotes from Solomon at me, I have three questions:

1. Are you sure which rod he's referencing? Even Biblical scholars disagree on this.
2. Okay, how did his son Rehoboam turn out?
3. Just out of curiosity, do you eat bacon and/or cheeseburgers, and/or shop at a store that's open on Sunday? Hey, nice tattoo, by the way.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with bacon. I eat bacon cheeseburgers all the time. However, I also don't use cherry-picked quotes from the Judeo-Christian Old Testament to justify an antiquated practice that science clearly shows there are better alternatives to.

A lot of people who quote the Judeo-Christian Bible on things that suit their own personal political agendas - and spanking is a political view whichever side you stand on it - tend to only use that which is convenient to their own viewpoint. It's one of my favorite things to call people out on their own hypocrisy.

Don't get me wrong, there are also a lot of seculars out there handing out the same tired excuses, none of which, so far, have been based on any form of reasonable verifiable evidence.

Come at me with "that's what's wrong with kids these days" and I will ask you if you know that juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes has gone down by 80% since 1994 and I can prove it. http://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/JAR_Display.asp?ID=qa05201

Of course, the pro-spankers will be quick to tell you that the statistics don't matter. Never mind that Iowa, a state that's banned the paddle from public AND private schools since 1989 is among those with the highest four-year graduation rate in the nation and is very frequently number one out of 50.

Or that Louisiana, a state where the paddle is still proudly used, has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Never mind that some countries, which have banned spanking even in the home - countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany - are now closing prisons due to a lack of people to put in them. Those must be coincidental too!

According to pro-spanking logic, the most trivial tidbit of information that even leans in their favor is "indisputable evidence that kids need to be spanked," but our side could literally provide indisputable proof that spanking's not such a good idea, and it would be dismissed.

If a person who was never spanked as a child so much as gets a speeding ticket, the pro-spankers get in a frothy-mouthed frenzy and scream at the top of their lungs that not spanking kids turns them into criminals. Yet if we were to point out that Martin Sheen spanked Charlie a couple of times, and he grew up to snort cocaine off of the asses of hookers, we'd be told to shut up (not that we would).

So I have one more question for pro-spankers when they make pro-spanking arguments. 

"Do you have any verifiable evidence to support your claim, or do you plan to rely solely on your unverified opinion, and expect me to just take your word for what you claim?"