{"id":808,"date":"2011-12-15T13:24:35","date_gmt":"2011-12-15T18:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/?p=808"},"modified":"2023-05-29T02:27:39","modified_gmt":"2023-05-29T07:27:39","slug":"otherwise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/2011\/12\/15\/otherwise","title":{"rendered":"You Thought Otherwise?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ll never understand how there are corporal punishment supporters in NYRA. It&#8217;s something that shocked the hell out of me loooong ago when I was new on the forums and found there was anyone in the organization justifying the practice! I mean, in a youth rights context, it should be a no-brainer. One of the most basic aspects of supporting someone&#8217;s rights is supporting their right to not be assaulted for supposed &#8220;misbehavior&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Got a reminder of it yesterday when <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/YouthRights\/posts\/317890818235558\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"post\" rel=\"noopener\">an anti-corporal punishment article<\/a> was posted to NYRA&#8217;s Facebook page. Seriously, click through that and check out all the comments.<\/p>\n<p>Some people are all &#8220;WTF? I thought NYRA was only against corporal punishment in schools?!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>*facepalm*<\/p>\n<p>Do they really think our opposition to corporal punishment is about WHO is hitting the kids rather than, you know, the idea of them being hit at all? Or, in general, did they not catch that we&#8217;re a &#8220;youth rights&#8221; organization?<\/p>\n<p>Hell, in 2009, when our opposition to school paddling was added to our Education position paper, someone at the annual meeting out and asked me &#8220;this is just for schools, right? so if I had kids, I could still smack them?&#8221; I gave him a dirty look that made him recoil a bit and answered plainly &#8220;just for schools&#8221; and my look that seemed to add &#8220;but go fuck yourself&#8221;. I mentioned this to Alex later, since that guy was a friend of his, but Alex insisted the guy was joking. Eh, maybe.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Speaking of Alex, as seen further down that comment thread, he just had to chime in with his usual \"oh dont worry, people who like beating children! NYRA doesn't have a position against parents hitting kids!\" Honestly, this is what annoys everyone about him, particularly these days. I know he's against corporal punishment just like the rest of us. But our newer members don't know that. Since in the past couple years, he's been quieting his own youth rights views in favor of being more diplomatic and \"moderate\" because he's afraid of NYRA seeming too fringe. As a result, he's more interested in pleasing \"potential\" supporters than us sticking to our guns, or at least that is strongly implied. I don't fault him for the diplomacy attempt, but he could at least stand with us more on the issue!\n\nIt's sort of like MLK's famous line that what we remember most is not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. It is in fact more disheartening for known supporters to prefer to keep quiet and thus not stand with us, than it is to hear anything our opponents have to say. We know we're outnumbered. We know the world is against us. As such, all we have is each other. But when some of our own prefer to avoid offending opponents with disagreement than to join our precious few in standing up for what we're about, it's incredibly discouraging. Even more so when it's a deliberate withdrawal rather than an accidental oversight.\n\nActually, maybe this answers my question. Maybe this is why many people don't totally understand what NYRA is. There are some who don't want NYRA to actually \"be\" anything, at least nothing too specific. But the trouble is, that leads to people completely not understanding why we do what we do. And, as such, we have people coming to our organization and being surprised that we... support youth rights. Our identity is unclear, and to some, deliberately so.\n\nThough even identity issues don't totally excuse these people. --> While the words &#8220;youth rights&#8221; can make people think all kinds of different things, many of which way off what we do, you&#8217;d think freedom from assault that&#8217;s called &#8220;discipline&#8221; would be obvious. I wonder if these same people join or follow an LGBT org and are surprised they are for same-sex marriage. I wonder if they join or follow an animal rights org and are surprised they are against fur.<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/stringlights.gif\" title=\"Merry Christmas!\"\/><\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ll never understand how there are corporal punishment supporters in NYRA. It&#8217;s something that shocked the hell out of me loooong ago when I was new on the forums and found there was anyone in the organization justifying the practice! I mean, in a youth rights context, it should be a no-brainer. One of the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/2011\/12\/15\/otherwise\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;You Thought Otherwise?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nyra-happenings","category-what-the-hell","category-youth-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=808"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2260,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions\/2260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eightminefortress.com\/surewhynot\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}