Judge Jose Longoria, village idiot

Hillary Clinton famously claimed “it takes a village to raise a child.”

Meet Jose Longoria, village idiot.

In his court, young mother Rosalina Gonzales recently pled guilty to a felony charge of injury to a child.

Her heinous crime?  Ms. Gonzales dared to spank her two year old daughter.

Prosecutors described the charge as a “pretty simple, straightforward spanking case.” Then why bother to prosecute?

Ms. Gonzales did not use a belt or bruise her child, but the spanking did apparently leave some red marks on the toddler’s rear end.

Charging this mother with any crime, much less a felony, is appalling. It’s a farce.

The meddlesome grandmother rushed the little girl to the emergency room merely because she’d been spanked. Did she panic, thinking the red marks were some sort of unusual allergic reaction?

Nothing about this story implies child abuse was involved, only parental discipline.

Yet in his wisdom, presiding Judge Jose Longoria admonished her and said,

You don’t spank children today. In the old days, maybe we got spanked, but there was a different quarrel. You don’t spank children.

Then what do you do?  Read them a story?

Now the courts can even decree how to raise a child…

I remember as a young boy once being spanked by my father hard enough to leave bruises. I also remember that I richly deserved it.

I’d thrown an object at a moving car, then ran away. It was a toy plastic “Tony the Tiger” paw from a box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes.

The cereal might be great, but it really isn’t a good idea to throw anything at a moving car.

My “friend” Alex ratted me out and my dad spanked me.

The fact I had no idea I could actually hit the car did not mitigate the fact I’d thrown something and hit an innocent driver’s car. I fully recovered, but I never forgot the lesson of that day.

Who knows? If I hadn’t learned my lesson at that impressionable age, I might have graduated to hurling bricks off bridges at passing traffic on the highway.

Is it ever a good idea to throw something at someone you don’t even know while they’re driving at high speed?

In a later incident sometime in high school, I distinctly remember one of the football coaches raised welts on my butt with a paddle for skipping class.

I wouldn’t call the episode “teen” abuse, either. I got caught breaking some rules that merited suspension.

I chose corporal punishment when offered the alternative. I didn’t want to be grounded before my date that weekend.

Now, this coach was very young and athletic. He had drilled holes in the paddle to improve its aerodynamics.

He wielded it two handed, like a baseball bat or samurai sword.  Three strikes and your fanny had difficulty sitting for the rest of the day. A paddling made a lasting impression.

I donned three pairs of gym shorts under my uniform pants to soften the blows. It helped a little. I managed to go out on my date.

Nevertheless, the long term residual effect of this latter paddling incident was so severely damaging, I’d forgotten about it completely — until I began writing this blog piece.

Don’t get me wrong; I learned to avoid getting caught for the same offense twice. And I still fondly remember the teacher who, frankly, tanned my butt.

As punishment for the “crime” of spanking her own daughter, Ms. Gonzales was sentenced to five years probation. She must take parenting classes and pay $50 extortion — I meant to say “fine” — to the Children’s Advocacy Center.

Does this “judge” even have children? What gives any judge the right to tell us how to raise ours?

Children must be taught to respect authority.

First they learn to respect the authority of their parents to make decisions on behalf of the child. Built on that foundation,  they learn to respect authoritarians within society. They must also learn that actions have consequences.

If a mother or father yells “STOP!” at the top of their lungs and the child ignores them, the consequences could be trivial.

The child might simply delay a family outing or cause some minor inconvenience.

Or, the consequences could be severe. The child might race into a busy street to be run over by a car.

Were I to see a mother or father slap the fanny of a misbehaving child in the grocery store, I probably wouldn’t give it a second thought.

A slap to the face might be different. Some of it depends on the behavior of the child that merited the punishment.

And without that ability to consistently enforce their parental authority, how does the mother or father convince the child to listen and obey when the consequences of disobedience could be death?

Grandma will be the loser in the long haul. Courts show remarkable preference for biological rights over relationships, and when Mom does get custody she’s working to get now, the visits to see Grandma will probably come few and far between.

By undermining parental efforts, Judge Longoria threatens to create a new generation of miscreants that won’t have respect for any authority. He wants to be Daddy to us all.

He’d better be prepared to pay a hell of a lot in child support.