The Satanic Temple just put up a billboard in Springtown, Texas reminding students that they don’t need to be physically abused in public schools through the act of corporal punishment.

The sign reads: “Never be hit in school again. Exercise your religious rights.” (That last line is a reference to one of the Temple’s Seven Fundamental Tenets that says “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.”)

Maybe your first thought was, “Does that even happen anymore?” Believe it or not, it does. The billboard directs people to The Protect Children Project website, which states:

Corporal punishment is legal in 19 states and over 110,000 children are legally hit in school each year with many requiring emergency room visits.

And Springtown is home to a school that gained attention a few years back after a male vice principal literally paddled a teenage girl to the point where she had welts on her body.

The Protect Children Project, which has been going on for a while now, doesn’t just take issue with physical punishment:

Tens of thousands of children in public schools in all 50 states are placed in solitary confinement as punishment. This practice in on the rise in schools even though seclusion is being phased out of prisons. Despite being a basic violation of human rights, deprivation of bathroom access is so commonplace in school that no government agency even bothers to track this.

According to Temple spokesperson Lucien Greaves,

“The rationale against child abuse should be obvious to even the dimwitted. Beating children is wrong. Subjecting children to psychological torture is wrong. Neither should be tolerated, much less sanctioned.” … “Hopefully, our billboard will serve as a daily reminder to the citizens there that they live in a barbaric backwater town where dysfunctional and possibly sexually disturbed middle-aged men may titillate their depraved impulses by violently spanking teenaged girls,” Greaves explains, “And hopefully the billboard can also serve as a beacon of hope to the youth of Springtown, showing them that they do have recourse to protect themselves against this shameful savagery.”

The fact that corporal punishment is still legal in many public schools is disturbing no matter how rarely it’s used. Good on the Temple for drawing attention to the matter.



