If you hit your dog, it's animal abuse.
If you hit your spouse, it's domestic violence.
Even drill sergeants aren't allowed to hit recruits.
But if you hit your children– people who can't possibly defend themselves, people who depend on you to survive... it's allowed. It's even encouraged by a significant fraction of parents today. To me, this seems like a glaringly immoral exception to a general rule: only use violence in defense of self or others. After all, pets can be controlled without hitting. Why can't kids?
Nope, they sure don't. Don't need to - the institutionalized psychological attacks and tearing down their worldview to replace it with the army's is much more effective than any physical reprimand could be.
> After all, pets can be controlled without hitting.
And how is this done? With pinch collars, crates, kennels, leashes, shock collars, staking them out, fences, rubbing their noses in their feces...
I'd rather the odd corporal punishment to being treated like a "pet".
Yes, we used the crate in order to speed up her housebreaking (working with her natural instincts), but she would also regularly use her crate (with the door open) on her own. Now, we've built her a little pseudo crate with a dog bed under a high-legged dresser. She goes there in any big thunderstorm still and will sometimes sleep there when the house is full of visitors.
I'm in favor of controlling dogs with appropriate use of crates/kennels, leashes, and fences. OTOH, I've never hit my kids, not because I think it's inherently wrong, but because I think it's a terribly slippery slope, especially given the inherent stresses in raising an infant through toddler.
My parents and my (private Christian K-5) school both used corporal punishment on me, and I have to say that I don't feel harmed nor scarred/scared by it. Looking back on the few instances that I specifically recall, it was done with positive intent and was basically effective.
I'm uncertain as to whether it's inherently wrong categorically, or whether it's just wrongly used by lazy parents in >99% of the instances. (There's no doubt that it has an immediate effect. A parent could be quite easily tempted to use that shortcut in an almost addictive fashion.)
Now, you can do real violence to your children. Hit them until they're black and blue and sore for days. Or you can do trivial violence: smack your kid on the bottom with your hand and make it sting a little bit, for a fraction of an hour.
Maybe you could do this violence as an outlet for the rage, frustration, and anger in your life. Maybe you do this routinely. Maybe you're an alcoholic. Alternatively, perhaps you've found your children willfully doing something very wrong or incredibly irresponsible, substantially endangering someone's life or property.
These are substantially different applications of violence. We should use caution about talking like they're the same.
"To me, this seems like a glaringly immoral exception to a general rule: only use violence in defense of self or others."
One premise of punishing your children -- in ANY way -- is that you're defending your children's future. You hope afterwards that they will be a better person, capable of self-discipline, unlikely to engage in self-destructive behavior or violence against the world at large. And as they are not yet mature -- mentally, emotionally, physically, or in the eyes of the law -- and as they are your responsibility, substituting your judgement for theirs is a thing that you do, and you can in fact defend them from themselves, for a while at least. (It is a different situation with your wife, or at least it damn well ought to be.)
In that case, the question becomes whether the punishment is actually an effective and humane means to those ends -- physical or otherwise. After all, children can be traumatized with routine verbal abuse as well as physical.
"After all, pets can be controlled without hitting. Why can't kids?"
Pets have substantially different brain structures and the ability to learn from negative feedback of any sort is highly variable. My understanding is that dogs can learn from it, but do best if the feedback is immediate, otherwise they're at risk of just feeling randomly attacked, and they start getting pretty neurotic. But birds can just about never learn from negative feedback. And, of course, we have substantially different sets of expectations for humans than we do for pets.
For that matter, the other two "liberal" methods you mentioned, shaming and time out don't work either. I believe what you are attempting to discredit is known as positive discipline. That traces its roots to Alfred Adler, with the date being 1964 when he first mentioned it. That's hardly liberal. However, if you actually study positive discipline, it's nothing more than taking the ideas of Dale Carnegie and applying them to children. And Carnegie freely admits his ideas were drawn from the Bible and other religious texts.
They are hardly liberal or conservative.