Keep Circumcision Legal
This is ridiculous. That’s all I have to say. I can’t believe I’m writing a blog post with the title, “Keep Circumcision Legal.”
From the Wall Street Journal:
SAN FRANCISCO—A group seeking to ban the circumcision of male children in San Francisco has succeeded in getting their controversial measure on the November ballot, meaning voters will be asked to weigh in on what until now has been a private family matter.
City elections officials confirmed Wednesday that the initiative had received enough signatures to appear on the ballot, getting more than 7,700 valid signatures from city residents. Initiatives must receive at least 7,168 signatures to qualify.
If the measure passes, circumcision would be prohibited among males under the age of 18. The practice would become a misdemeanor offense punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 or up to one year in jail. There would be no religious exemptions.
How sad, but what an opportunity to share about the right to life of the unborn. If they are willing to see how a parent’s decisions should be limited after birth, then they should be willing to see the same principle before birth.
While making circumcision illegal is a little much, there isn’t any real medical necessity for circumcision. Additionally, from studies that I’ve read, most boys are circumcised because their father’s are. Parents don’t want to worry about boys wondering why they’re different from their dads. For me, any way to have my sons undergo one less unnecessary medical procedure is good.
I wouldn’t worry too much about this law. It’s so unconstitutional that it’ll be struck down faster than you can say bris.
If they can pass laws against female genital mutilation (being overwhelmingly harming, not medically necessary, etc.) then they can pass this law, too, and for the same reasons.
As with female genital mutilation (FGM), there are varying degrees. But unlike FGM, modern circumcision is nearly always the complete or total excising, in which a man loses about 80% of the genital nerves due to the complete removal of the most sensitive region. There’s a lot history on how this came to be, but the two major steps were in antiquity and modernity.
In antiquity, the original (read: OT) circumcision involved merely the foremost part of the prepuce only. Being left mostly intact, Jewish men could (with a little effort, it was a stretch, so to speak) come to pass for gentiles in environments where their Jewishness would be obvious. To prevent this, the practice of the more extreme (total) circumcision came into being as it’s irreversible and almost entirely prevents restoration.
The second major influence came along in the repressive Victorian era, in which the aggressive anti-sexual mores of the day found their way into early medical practice. The fear that someone would experience or be tempted to experience pleasure with their bodies (as a child, and later as an adult) proved a horrid thought in the Victorian era. Hence the radical circumcision was resurrected as a practice, dubiously promoted as a medical solution to the moral horror of sexual enjoyment. Peddled along with this practice was the idea that uncircumcision was unsightly, uncivilized, and thus repulsive to the opposite sex. In Muslim regions, FGM is promoted for the same reasons and with the same results. Both lose approximately 80% of their genital nerve endings (clitordectomy and full circumcision) for religious and culturally-bound aesthetic reasons, with little thought to the damage, complications or consent. The reason for the outrage behind FGM is that it’s performed at an age where the girl is old enough to remember the act and screams bloody murder through the whole thing, performed in unsanitary conditions. Males experience the same loss, except as voiceless infants at the hands of doctors in hospitals. The sanitization of the circumcision procedure behind hospital walls — along with persistent medical misinformation and cultural biases — keep the practice going. Western feminism has given voice to the plight of all things female, not male. But education is starting to work and circumcision is on the decline substantially in the U.S., and laws like the one proposed in San Francisco may start popping up more.
Little kids are born with a foreskin; IT’S A NORMAL BODYPART. I CANNOT EVEN BEGIN TO COMPREHEND HOW SO MANY PEOPLE CANNOT GRASP THIS SIMPLE CONCEPT. The foreskin is no different from the clitoral hood of a woman, or even the big toenail of a man. We do not make little kids have their big toenails cut off to prevent ingrown toenail, nor do we make little kids have their tonsils out to prevent tonsillitis.
The parents have no right to amputate a normal, healthy body part. This is ultimately a civil rights issue, plain and simple. As men, we do not demand any special rights or privileges. We merely demand the SAME rights and privileges afforded to women.
The hygiene issue is something I found both disgusting and offensive. We teach our little girls how to clean their private parts. If a little girl can be trusted to clean her private parts, then I’m sure that a little boy can be trusted to clean his. As a male, I find it to be VERY insulting to my intelligence (and also very degrading) to think that I somehow can’t be trusted to keep my private parts clean, even though a little girl can clean her private parts without any trouble.
Furthermore, the fact that women have a foreskin (the have a clitoral hood, and they have the lips of their vagina, which one could argue are nothing more than disgusting pieces of skin where dirt and germs could collect and cause a vaginal yeast infection or something) also goes to prove how inconsistent and hypocritical people really are with regard to this. So many of these people claim that a parent has every right to cut off a boy’s foreskin. Yet I can guarantee that these are the same people who would scream bloody murder if a doctor were to do so much as make a pinprick in a little girl’s foreskin. (And if they were to turn a little girl’s clitoral hood into a skin graft for a burn victim, then forget about it; human rights groups would be up in arms over the whole thing. They’d accuse the doctors of committing acts of violence and of oppression against women).
That was a part of MY penis that they removed without MY consent (how would a woman feel if they cut off her clitoral hood?). I have to be reminded of this every time I go to the bathroom. And if that alone is not a good enough reason to criminalize the practice then I do not know WHAT IS.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about this law. It’s so unconstitutional that it’ll be struck down faster than you can say bris.”
What if it’s a commandment in my religion to cut off my child’s breast nipple??? Are you going to make a religious exemption for me????