Samuel Martin, son of the late Earnest Martin has been on a long-time quest of ending corporal punishment of children. Witnessing what he did in the church and around the world, he has written two books that have had wide acclaim on the subject. He has now taken on the role of Executive Director of the US Alliance to End the Hitting of Children.
Dear friends,
Warmest regards.
I pray that you are well at this time.
It is my honor to write you and ask you to join me in supporting this important campaign.
In April of this year, I began a new role with the US Alliance to End the Hitting of Children as the Executive Director.
Many of you will know of my long track record of work to end corporal punishment/spanking/smacking especially focused on those whose minds are the hardest to change: religious believers in spanking children.
Thankfully, by God's grace, my first book, which many of you will be aware of, Thy Rod and Thy Staff, They Comfort Me: Christians and the Spanking Controversy, which has been given away free of charge since 2011, has been downloaded by 1,000s of Christians and other people from around the world.
This book continues to be free and will remain free. You can get it on my own website - www.biblechild.com or here on the US Alliance to End the Hitting of Children's website - https://www.endhitting.org/thy-rod-and-thy-staff
Many of you know of my private activism against corporal punishment. My book has been used all over the world in places like South Africa, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, Eswatini, the UK, Canada and the USA.
I have made this book available free because I wanted it to reach as many people with a message of peace, reconciliation, non-violence and healing. Thankfully, for many people who have read the book, it has been a blessing for them.
I am so grateful to anyone who has read the book and shared it with a loved one, a family member or a friend.
Now, I am asking for your help.
My activism against corporal punishment up until this point has been 100% voluntary. I have never been paid for the work that I have done promoting non violence in Christian homes. Over the last 35 years, I have worked in the world of non profit organizations to earn a living for my family. That continues to this day, but now I have taken the experience that I have learned in this work and am now bringing that experience into the work of the US Alliance to End the Hitting of Children.
I am very excited about the opportunities that lie ahead and this is where you have a role in helping me.
To do work in the non profit world, we need resources to do our activities. These resources that the US Alliance to End the Hitting of Children is focusing on are the following:
1. individual supporters
2. private foundations
3. US governmental funds at the local, state and national level
The US Alliance the End the Hitting of Children up until this year has been quite small. Over the last four years, the organization has averaged about $20,000 per year in donations.
This means that our activities working to end corporal punishment have been limited. But that is about to change.
This is because today we have released our first campaign to raise money from individual supporters to move the organizations work forward.
These funds are going to help us secure other funds from institutional donors and from the US government.
Believe me, I have been working as a professional development worker for the last 20 years and my areas of expertise are in institutional fundraising and project development. I am bringing all of my experience to this work now to help develop this institution.
Now, we are moving forward in a way to really see the work of this important organization grow and flourish.
You have a role in seeing that that happens.
I am asking you to join me in supporting this organization.
I am not ask you to support me.
However, I am asking you to make a donation to this campaign and to say that you are with us.
Please, if you have benefitted from my book, please I am asking you to consider making a donation of any size to this campaign.
Please join me in supporting this work whose fruit is seeing family violence reduced and hopefully end.
Here is the link for the GOFUNDME site for this campaign -
I am asking you to give generously to this campaign knowing that your donation is going to help us secure other funds and to see your support pooled together with others in support of this important work.
All donations are 100% tax deductible according to the relevant rules of the US government.
I have never asked anyone to donate to any effort that I can recollect. I am now asking you to do so asking that God will bless you for your generosity.
With most sincere thanks and appreciation,
Samuel Martin
Executive Director
The US Alliance to End the Hitting of Children
18 Upper Main Street
Sharon CT 06069
Office Telephone: +1 860 387 4514
Email: smartin@endhitting.org
Website: www.endhitting.org
11 comments:
This has to be one of the best examples of taking one of the many Armstrong negatives and turning it into a positive that I've ever seen. It is sublimation at the highest level!
Congratulations, Samuel. I am hoping that you continue to have the greatest possible impact in this area for many years!
Sounds like he wants to lobby the government to restrict spanking. I'm not on board with that. Child abuse is wrong. Period. But spanking is not always synonymous with child abuse. The reality is that doing the wrong thing hurts, and being aware of that is advantageous. IMO it would be a mistake to leave kids unprepared for that reality. Spanking done appropriately can be one of many ways to communicate that message to kids.
Some kids need a swat in order to not play with electrical outlets. The swat is better than electrocution. Sure you could try the helicopter parent route to protect them, but then you could stunting the child's maturation process, and what are they going to do when you're no longer parenting them?
I was spanked as a child, and I am grateful. I had cousins who were not spanked, and no one liked them because they didn't know how to act. They grew up lonely, did drugs, and went to jail. Kids who are unsocialized (whiny/throws fits/doesn't share/etc) after age 4 are embarrassing/obnoxious to be around. I remember being that age, and those kids were not invited to play with the others.
GTA's "Plain Truth About Child Rearing" book was horrific. It advocated spanking babies for crying to want attention!
Im not against light weight , gentle corporal punishment, but the WCG had a policy of spanking nearly everyone, and apparently even Meredith , at one time, advocated SPANKING YOUR WIFE!
Proverbs 23:13-14 NLT Don’t fail to discipline your children. The rod of punishment won’t kill them. Physical discipline may well save them from death.
No school and NO ONE outside the parent should ever be allwoed to discipline a child in this day and age. Those that do should be arrested for child absue.
It is interesting that the words "discipline" and "disciple" share some etymology. Does anyone here think that this means that Jesus spanked the disciples? (Just kidding!)
I've grown tired of the one size fits all approach that Armstrongism always took. They preached alcohol consumption without taking into consideration the well known fact that a certain percentage of humans are genetically predisposed towards alcoholism. Ridiculous things were done, such as anointing for alcoholism, and HWA shut down the AA program started in the church by Mr. Dale Hampton.
Behavioral scientists have recognized for years that child abuse is a cycle which, unless broken, is passed from generation to generation. With child abuse comes a great deal of anger! Yet, there was never any screening, or questioning in counseling about whether a new parent was abused while growing up themselves. Corporal punishment was preached from the pulpit, and parents who had suffered excessive punishment as children bear holy hell out of their kids. The reality is that just as an alcoholic, or someone with a family history of alcoholism, should be counseled to refrain from drinking, a parent who was abused as a child should be told not to spank their children! This is for the children's protection.
Sound autobiographical? It is. After I left home, the only times I ever had anything to do with my parents was when it was completely unavoidable. They never got to know me, or know much of anything about my life. One of the really bad aspects of Armstrongism is that it produces the same symptoms in an individual as does narcissism. In other words, the parents are so tied up in their church, its practices, and their status in it, that they simply do not have time to address or nourish their childrens' emotional needs. And, most of the punishment the kids suffer occurs when their behavior interferes with the things the parents are doing that the church requires.
Sorry! I am on Samuel's side of this issue. Makes much more sense than what the ancients might have done. There are plenty of nonviolent ways to discipline children. Also, parents should try to reason with their kids when they reach a certain age. In Armstrongism, spanking was all too often the first resort, when it should have been the last.
Armstrongites love to quote this verse "Proverbs 23:13-14 NLT Don’t fail to discipline your children. The rod of punishment won’t kill them. Physical discipline may well save them from death."
We have seen how well this worked out in the church for its youth! Remember the spanking tents at the Feast of Tabernacles? It got so bad the ministry had to tell members to stop taking children to them to beat them, because the public was witnessing the beatings and it was hitting the press - at least in the Pocono's.
Does the word translated "rod" mean a stick or does it mean a standard for behavior, much like a yard stick, is a standard of measurement? Spare the rod and spoil the child could mean, "set a standard of behavior" rather than "hit the kid with a stick."
Proverbs 23:13-14 is talking about how a shepherd takes care of his flock of sheep. The shepherd had a rod or staff. He used the rod to guide his sheep. If a lamb or sheep got stuck he could use the crook to pull the animal out of trouble. The shepherd never hit his sheep.
Some people never seem to have gotten a good smack from their mothers for misbehaving. Then again, I also knew many many frequently-whacked kids who still couldnt behave as adults and well, many of em didnt fare too well in life.
I make no particular allegiance here to any "one size fits all" approach. Glad Martin has something to be passionate about though.
Precisely, 6:18, and 10:38! Herbert W. Armstrong's pathology involved always taking the most extreme, the most inconvenient, the most ultraconservative interpretation of scripture. He was a fanatic. His followers chose him because they tended towards fanaticism themselves. He spoke to their core personality, and they signed up for the program.
Behavioral studies indicate that statistically, there are more offenders in prison who were harshly and unfairly punished by their parents than there are prisoners who had a permissive upbringing. The Bible even supports this if any of us had been inclined to do a concordance study on anger. Disproportionate punishment in youth causes lifelong anger issues. It is automatic cause and effect. If it were not for all of my white middle class privilege, I know that the antisocial activities and contempt for all authority figures, in which I regularly indulged and reveled prior to my realization of these and efforts at self correction would have landed me in jail. There were others who were not so fortunate, like the WCG kids who joined the US Marine Corp during the Viet Nam era just to get away from an oppressive home.
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