An interesting article on a pastor getting 2 years in jail for advocating Corporal Punishment. hat do you think?

I know this is asking for trouble, but what do you think about the article below?

Written on May 30, 2012 at 9:10 am by Tim Brown

Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi sentenced a pastor to two years in prison. What was his crime? He taught the people of his church to discipline their children with a wooden spoon.

Philip Caminiti, 55, was pastor of Aleitheia Bible Church, which meets in the homes of its members.

Apparently in Wisconsin the Bible cannot be taught or acted upon. The society there now thinks it is child abuse to spank your children when they are acting up, in order to correct them.

The Scriptures teach,

Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.

Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.

The Scriptures do not call men to abuse their children, but to lovingly administer corrective discipline. We teach with our mouths and then if necessary administer discipline.

I recall growing up. I would get spankings and I must say, I am thankful for receiving them now. I wasn’t at the time. At the time they hurt, but they curbed my desire to go and do what I got a spanking for. I’m sure there are many who are just as thankful today they had parents that loved them enough to discipline them when they were younger.

A father or mother who is unwilling to correct their children does not love them.

What is most interesting in this story is it is happening in America. This pastor’s First Amendment right to speech and to freedom of religion has been violated. Notice, he was not imprisoned for child abuse, nor was he imprisoned because he disciplined his children, but because he taught parents to discipline their children.

The out of line judge, and probably so because she never had parents that disciplined her, said, “What is important to me is there was and continues to this day no expression of remorse or repentance for the consequences of those actions, or what the whole chain of events has led the family and the community through.”

I certainly wouldn’t be repentant or remorseful either. I don’t know how Mr. Caminiti was teaching discipline, except that he was teaching to use a wooden spoon and that the children were between two months and five years old. I would think two months is awfully young, but I’m sure the issue was not that parents were just stringing their children up and spanking them severely at any of those ages. In fact, we are not told that any of the people of his congregation were arrested.

The Wisconsin State Journal reports,

The practice, intended to teach children to behave correctly, was stopped after police intervened in November 2010.

“The children were beaten for of all things doing what children do, and that is crying,” Sumi said.

Caminiti will be on extended supervision for six years after his release from prison. Despite objections on constitutional grounds by Caminiti’s lawyers, Sumi ordered that he not have any contact with the Aleitheia Bible Church and have no leadership role in any church.

While that barred Caminiti from having contact with members of his extended family who are church members, Sumi did allow him to be with his wife, their children and their grandchildren. She turned down a request to delay his prison sentence until after an appeal of his case.

Corporal punishment is allowed in the state I live in and many other states. While I realize there are people who abuse children, corporal discipline is vital in the life of a child growing up that will one day enter society on their own. I can tell you that if parents don’t discipline their children, then the law and the courts will, because there is no doubt the children will grow up to be even more foolish then they were.