I know it's sort of taboo to judge the way people parent, but I wound up doing this very deep dive of looking into like 40 odd years of texts, you know, parenting manuals, and then at the same time also talking to I think roughly it was about

150 interlocutors and I was shocked at just the utter brutality of all of it done like very much in the name of God.

Let me elaborate in kind of what we mean by this style of discipline. I mean for one it is

corporal punishment. Spanking is highly encouraged.

There is this idea that like sort of man's inherent nature is sinful and this is manifest from like the time a child is born.

There's no exemption because you're a cute three-year-old.

Yeah, no, a baby is crying because it is selfish.

And then you have this ritual of forgiveness afterwards,

where you hold your child.

To let them know that you really love them.

Yeah, it's so dark.

It's just like how to cross wires 101, but I did talk to some parents who had raised their kids this way and they were like

This is how everyone in my church was disciplining their kids and I felt that if I didn't discipline my kids in this way

I would be condemning them to hell like to this fate worse than death and so there was

an element in which I'm not saying that it hurt parents more than kids, but there were parents who were like coerced into this method of parenting that's brutal and violent and like shatters your relationship with their kids.

Yes, it probably was painful for many parents who their conscience, let's say,

was saying, this isn't right, but you hang over the threat of eternal damnation

of their kid's soul. what are they going to do?

Right, and there's so much to unpack like the sort of intimate physicality of these kinds of ritualized

beatings, like the way it messes people up sexually, like there's so much in it?

Yes, I mean as a gay kid raised in a fundamentalist church, like the kind of mix of physical punishment and sexual purity,

whether straight or gay, I mean it's neurosis-inducing to be so fixated on sexual purity in this precise way. It's a really toxic mix.

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