Christian lawmaker still wants teachers to be able to hit students with disabilities

Oklahoma State Sen. Shane Jett cited the Bible while opposing a bill to ban corporal punishment against students with disabilities

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Once again, a Republican lawmaker in Oklahoma argued that it ought to be okay for teachers to beat students with disabilities because not doing so would be unbiblical.

Oklahoma currently permits corporal punishment in public schools. That’s a problem in and of itself, but the law at least has a carve-out exempting students with “the most significant cognitive disabilities.” Teachers can theoretically spank kids but a handful of students are off-limits because they may not even understand they’re doing anything wrong.

In 2023, Republicans attempted to pass House Bill 1028, which was designed to broaden that exemption so that it applied to all students with disabilities. One Republican signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill specifically because he thought this would be an easy vote. “There's going to be nobody who's for corporal punishment on students with disabilities,” he said.

He must have forgotten that he’s surrounded by other Republicans from Oklahoma.

They will always find a way to defend abuse in the name of Jesus.

For example, when that bill was brought up for debate in 2023, State Rep. Jim Olsen argued that the Bible permits hitting a child as a form of discipline—therefore that option must be available to teachers regardless of who the victims will be. He cited Proverbs 13:24, the infamous verse that gave us, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” When someone challenged him and said the American Academy of Pediatrics supports banning any form of physical discipline against children because there’s plenty of evidence showing the harm it causes in the long term, Olsen said it didn’t matter because “God's counsel is higher than the American Academy of Pediatrics.”

Another GOP lawmaker, Randy Randleman, said teachers needed the threat of corporal punishment in order to keep their classrooms in order. But if your classroom is so chaotic that physical discipline appears to be your only solution, you’re a shitty teacher. And if you believe threatening children—children with disabilities, no less!—with abuse is the only way to maintain order, you’re a shitty parent. And if you believe giving parents and teachers the right to team up to beat up children with disabilities is the best way to correct their behavior, you’re a shitty politician.

That bill eventually sailed through the State House after it was amended to give parents the final say on whether their children with disabilities could be subject to abuse. (Teachers couldn’t just beat them on their own volition.) The bill was headed toward passage in the State Senate but the timing just didn’t work out and the bill went nowhere… until 2024, when senators brought it up again. This time, the opt-in clause for parents was removed, but that was fine since the bill itself said teachers wouldn’t be allowed to abuse any children with disabilities. The bill specifically prohibited teachers from “hitting, slapping, paddling, or [using] any other means of inflicting physical pain” on students who have an individualized education program (IEP).

That should have been a unanimous vote with no discussion needed.

But when the bill was discussed, Republican State Sen. Shane Jett did the honors of defending the abuse of children with disabilities… all in the name of Jesus. He also condemned one of the most popular doctors in history when it comes to the subject of parenting.

Effectively, we're taking a tool that has been in the hands of parents and in the hands of schools to maintain discipline, and we're removing it from the parents' prerogative and saying, we, Big Brother, the state of Oklahoma, knows what's best for your child, and we're removing an entire motivational tool from discipline in the classroom.

…

… And this is an erosive and a corrosive element in the United States whenever Dr. Benjamin Spock published a book that said, “Don't discipline your children. Don't spank your children.” And a lot of people don't know that his voice was elevated because it fit a particular agenda. Dr. Benjamin Spock was a Socialist who ran for the People's Party. That means he's a Communist.

…

… I already cited Proverbs 13:24: “Whoever spares the rod hates their child, but he who loves them disciplines them.” And we're saying the state of Oklahoma has unilaterally decided if you have vision impairment, you cannot be disciplined, even if your parents want that. We're going to unilaterally take that away from our schools and our parents, more importantly. If you are hearing impaired, suddenly you're in a different class, you cannot be disciplined. And we've already made it abundantly clear that children can misbehave regardless of their abilities or inabilities, capabilities or incapabilities.

…

Are we sending a message that we don't love our children?

…

At the end of the day, you're looking at Socialist-slash-Communist principles versus biblical principles.

Jewish culture, Christian culture, and any common sense culture understands that if you don't discipline children, or you create a class of children that cannot be disciplined, those discipline problems are gonna cascade through the rest of society. And we are seeing that now, from Dr. Spock telling Christian parents, “Don't spank your children,” and they follow Dr. Spock instead of the Bible.

Dr. Spock was a communist who ran for president with a Communist Party. This is Communist ideology.

…

I urge you to vote against this bill. It is bad public policy.

It was utter lunacy from a Republican who felt hitting kids was the best (and only) way to teach them right from wrong. If we love children, he argued, then we should be allowed to abuse them.

(Dr. Spock, by the way, pushed for universal health care, the decriminalization of abortion and homosexuality, guaranteed income for families, and the end to the pointless war in Vietnam. That why Jett singled him out for being a “Communist.”)

Despite Jett’s opposition, the bill passed in the State Senate… and then died in the House when time simply ran out on the legislative session.

So now we’re doing it again.

Earlier this year, Republican State Sen. David Rader filed SB 364, a bill that would prohibit corporal punishment from being used against any student with a disability—not just those with the “most significant cognitive disabilities.” His bill also eliminated a part of the law that allowed teachers to hit those kids if their parents gave permission.

Once again, there shouldn’t be any opposition to this. Indeed, every member of the Senate Education Committee recommended passing this bill.

But before the official Senate vote occurred, Jett tried once again to convince his colleagues that the Bible wants teachers to beat up kids with disabilities. (It’s here around the 2:11:00 mark.)

How does the author of this bill rectify or bring… congruent with Proverbs 23:13 that says “Do not withhold discipline from a child. If you punish them with a rod, they will not die. Punish them with a rod and save them from death.” And the author cited that they are different. But in Scripture, it’s uniformly applied to everyone. Is there a different application of salvation?…

… Here’s another one: Proverbs 29:17: “Discipline your children and they will give you peace and they’ll bring you delight and delights that you desire.” In our classrooms, how are we going to maintain discipline so that our teachers can teach academics if we have this disparate way of discipling children?…

He also brought up Dr. Spock… again.

And I will tell you: This “no corporal punishment” initiative is not in the interests of children or civilized society. It was popularized, back when I was a child, by Dr. Benjamin Spock, who was not a parent, but he wrote a book about the evils of discipline and corporal punishment. He ran later… for President of the United States as a Socialist.

This is a top-down, socialist-aligned, ideological, unilateral divorce between parents' ability to collaborate with their local schools to establish a discipline regimen that includes corporal punishment. It is in violation of scripture and ideologically aligned with Socialist ideology that should not be part of this body's legislative initiatives.

This guy has such a fetish for hitting children that he just recycles the same awful arguments in justification of physical abuse.

This mentality ought to be expected from people like Jett, though. Hitting kids has long been a core belief among fundamentalist Christians. Years ago, Michael and Debi Pearl wrote an infamous guide to faith-based abuse called To Train Up a Child. It’s a book that tells adults how to properly hit their kids, and it’s as awful as it sounds, recommending that Christian parents physically discipline kids as young as six months with “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules.”

In Oklahoma, this isn’t just theoretical. School officials have regularly taken advantage of that law:

Oklahoma educators reported using physical discipline 3,968 times during the 2017-18 school year, according to the most recent federal data available from the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education. The federal government reported that corporal punishment was administered at more than 1,800 Oklahoma schools.

The same people who quote the Bible are the ones using their power to defeat a bill so that more vulnerable students can be hurt just a little more. They want to protect kids from learning about systemic racism while making sure teachers have the option to beat students with disabilities.

All because their Christian faith taught them that abuse is more effective than compassion.

Oklahoma State Sen. Shane Jett (screenshot via YouTube)

The good news is that many Republicans weren’t swayed by anything Jett said. The Senate passed the bill 31-16, with Democrats and several Republicans coming together to get this done. (All the opposition came from Republicans who want teachers to have the option of beating children with disabilities.) The bill now goes to the State House.

If and when this bill becomes a law, corporal punishment will still be legal in Oklahoma, which is a travesty, but at least some kids will be immune from the consequences of Republican cruelty.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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