Extremist Supply Company has asked the U.S. Department of Education to buy belts for spanking schoolchildren. The request is satire. Extremist Supply is a parody website, and it mocks the view, common among many Fundamentalist Christians, that the Bible approves of corporal punishment and that God endorses it.
To make the point, the site displays a product line called Fundamentalism belts. They are presented as tools for beating children, which is exactly the practice the project sets out to attack.
An artist on the road
The man behind the project is artist Daniel Vander Ley, a participant in ArtPrize9. Over the past two weeks he drove to Kansas and Tennessee. There he confronted legislators about spanking in public school classrooms.
Thirty-one states have banned the practice, including Michigan, the home state of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Those states acted more than 25 years ago, after many studies found that corporal punishment harms children and the wider community.
The National Institute of Health keeps a large archive of that research, and anyone can read it for free. The studies link physical punishment to depression, suicidal thoughts and anxiety disorders. They also tie it to lower wages, less schooling, later abuse of wives, and higher rates of drug use and alcoholism. Even so, 19 states still allow hitting in public schools.
A bid for 200,000 spankings
Extremist Supply is now publicly asking DeVos and her department to issue a request for quotes on standard paddling tools. The company says it will submit a bid. If it wins, it would cover the roughly 200,000 spanking sessions held in U.S. schools each year.
In a letter to DeVos, the company writes as a small business hoping to supply the education system. It offers its belts, which it says were pretested for quality and performance. Because her department oversees so many spankings, the letter argues, it ranks among the top spankers in the world. Worse still, the letter adds, the punishment falls disproportionately on children with disabilities and on minority students.
The company enclosed a sample belt, number 1 in a limited run of 100. It invited the secretary to try it personally, in the field. The letter then lists the states where schools paddle children regularly: WY, MO, KY, AR, TN, NC, SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, LA, OK, AZ, TX, ID, SD, CO, KS and IN.
Vander Ley also invited DeVos to talk at his booth, since the project is on view at ArtPrize9 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The gallery Zoko822 hosts it at the corner of Ionia Ave. NW and Newberry St. NW, open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on most days. He says he expects a clear statement from her on Grand Rapids values before the festival ends, and he plans to publish her decision on ending school corporal punishment.