{"id":1791,"date":"2009-08-02T13:04:20","date_gmt":"2009-08-02T01:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/?p=1791"},"modified":"2009-08-02T13:04:20","modified_gmt":"2009-08-02T01:04:20","slug":"smacking-referendum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/archives\/1791","title":{"rendered":"Smacking referendum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Despite the Returning Officer Robert Peden&#8217;s words &#8220;Voting in the referendum is easy&#8221;, I am conflicted about how and whether to vote. Smacking is not necessarily abuse, and the current law is bad law. But New Zealand&#8217;s problem with violence against children is shameful, and the law is likely to have a good effect: gradually changing the culture so that physical abuse becomes less acceptable. So I don&#8217;t want to see the bad law overturned, and therefore I don&#8217;t want to vote No. But Jesus&#8217; command to tell the truth (e.g. Matthew 5:37) means I ought not to vote Yes either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite the Returning Officer Robert Peden&#8217;s words &#8220;Voting in the referendum is easy&#8221;, I am conflicted about how and whether to vote. Smacking is not necessarily abuse, and the current law is bad law. But New Zealand&#8217;s problem with violence against children is shameful, and the law is likely to have a good effect: gradually [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1791"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1793,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791\/revisions\/1793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}