But we have discovered a few things, notably that research on the vice or virtue of smacking is not definitive.
Most parents do not want to make it illegal while most alleged experts (certainly those referred to in the New Zealand media) do.
Unfortunately, the major issue has been unexplored: we have cast our understanding of relationships between a parent and child within a human rights framework.
This recent quote from a Christchurch academic is normative: "Anti-smacking legislation is not about parents.
It is about children and their future.
We need to step away from the rights of parents and focus on the rights of children to grow up in a home free of physical discipline."
The central argument is that somehow or other we must find a balance between the rights of children and the rights of parents.
From start to finish the problem is presented as a legal issue.
But in essence, the problem is not at any point about the law.
The law has never been in the business - except under some absolutist regimes and those in the process of becoming absolutist - of trying to make people good.
It is about preventing, punishing or making amends; not about loving.
The problem with human rights legislation is that it has become absolutist.
Human rights have become the guide to personal behaviour and morality.
In 1948, the United Nations representatives did not adopt a universal declaration as some kind of absolute; rather, they expressed a set of moral convictions which were held in common and from which human rights might be formulated.
Unfortunately, certainly as the debate around the discipline of children has been discussed in New Zealand, we have entered a reductionist world where human rights are supreme.
The moral convictions that gave rise to post-World War 2 rights theory have been replaced by human rights doctrine - fluid ideas forged on the anvil of contemporary ideologies and hammered out in the realm of political debate and in the media.
As a result, today's children and young people will probably know a great deal more about their rights than they will about the 10 Commandments or the commands of Christ to love one another.
The idea of human rights, certainly in the West, is based on the Christian and Jewish notion that every human being is sacred.
There is something about every human being that demands we do certain things to or for them and that we do not do certain other things to or for them.
When the idea of the sacredness of every human being is foremost in our minds, attitudes towards each other tend to be shaped by respect and in some cases by love.
But lose a belief in the sacredness of each person, and respect and love for the other is eroded by a growing self-centredness.
So, instead of an understanding of rights based on moral convictions and responsibilities, we end up with the state and its laws as a substitute.
Our present attempt to apply human rights law to family dynamics is destructive because what is essentially an exercise in moral responsibility is turned into one of legal rights.
The dynamic between a parent and child is not one about balancing the rights of the parent against the child or the child against the parent.
In fact, it is not about balancing rights at all.
The relationship between a parent and child is not the same kind of relationship as that between citizens.
It is not and never has been a relationship between equals.
Human rights legislation might be very helpful in causing good working relationships between citizens, but it has little value deciding how a parent should treat his or her child.
When used little and lightly, physical correction is not violence any more than when a surgeon performs an operation: both behaviours will cause pain and discomfort, but the means is in harmony with the ends.
Neither is a violation either, because it is what parents and doctors do in their respective spheres of influence and responsibility.
Equating parental correction with violence is seldom challenged, but it should be, because within the context of the parent-child relationship, no responsible parent would desire to inflict severe or lasting pain.
It is intriguing, and revealing, that all the do-gooder government agencies, bleating NGOs and liberal academics supporting the recent law change emotively and incorrectly correlate parenting, which includes the occasional smack for correction, with violence.
Note, too, the trumped-up language which includes words like "whacking", "beating" and "abuse": all intended to create a particular mindset of parents hell-bent on turning their offspring into the next generation of violent and hardened criminals.
To insist the dynamic between parent and child is one of balancing rights is to undermine the order of things.
It is an attempt to make the law do something it cannot possibly do.
• Bruce Logan is a writer and educationist.
