In the South the issue is intimately bound up in cultural and religious identity, and ties in with the remnant of the frontier value system that underpinned much of the expansion West. Because of this pedagogic arguments or those put forward by pediatricians don’t carry the same weight here, as perhaps in the North East, or in liberal, amoral California. Strangely the dynamic of racial identification in the South has led the black community to adopt the paddle even more solidly than the white community( despite the connection with the slave plantations), and the rural communities, who are more conservative, and ‘closer to God and nature’ to hold on more intently than the urban cities.