Slate recently reported that spanking children may not be such a bad form of discipline after all. Surprisingly, the reporter pushed past a lot of the cultural anti-spanking prejudice to ask some reasonable questions about what the studies indicate. Although it appears she has not been persuaded to spank her own child, and she chooses to end the piece with a touch of doomsday, she maintains a level of clearheadedness in much of the article.

But I suspected at some point the article would get awkward, because discussions on discipline always do. There comes a point when you must define spanking, you must explain what spanking is and that can only be done by explaining what it looks like in…