I meant “did not suffer as a resut” in my previous post, obviously…
Well, since you’re clearly up-to-date on the whole thread, perhaps you would kindly explain your reasons for equating FGM with circumcision.
I probably poorly explained myself, especially since I already tried to explain it again once.
Of course, the belief isn’t included in the scar, etc…Still, the scar does symbolically express it, or express the belonging to the group in the flesh. That’s what these people are doing. Engraving in the flesh of children the (assumed) belonging of these children to this particular group.
You know, clair, despite your hysterical rantings on how you don’t like religion and have no problems banning ones whose practices displease you (don’t argue: that is the result of what you’re trying to do), this debate had nothing to do with religion until catsix’s batshit insane rantings on how even Jewish folks shouldn’t get to circumcise their kids.
I had taken it as a given that a harmless practice (though somewhat associated with religion), if outlawed, would be given an exception for the case of a religious belief. It was catsix’s rantings on how Jews don’t “really” need to circumcise their kids that led to all that explanation.
As I’ve said, you make yourself clear. You don’t care about the right of others to practice a religion, so it’s fine to you if the central ritual of the religion is banned. Even though you yourself admit that there’s no reason to think it’s harmful (at least that’s what I get out of the tortured syntax herein: “For the umpteenth time, either the practice is harmful, either it isn’t”).
You only seem to think it’s bad because it’s the practice of a religion, and it ‘marks’ the kid in some way. And the kid doesn’t consent to that marking. Fine. It seems your goal is to make it harder for parents to pass their religious beliefs to their children.
Lost in this is the fact that circumcision hasn’t been shown to effect the pleasure of sex in any way. (Your reply confused “pleasure” and “sensation” - what I pointed out was that there’s no way to compare sensation, while the pleasure of the sex act depends on a lot more than whatever sensations are being sent from a single erogenous zone.) Even if sensation is affected - for which there is no evidence (in the case of the vast majority of circumcisions that are done properly) - the effect is obviously minor, since cut guys, beyond a very, very small number, report no loss in pleasure. Even that very small number is self-selected: the fact that a group of guys blames a bad sex life on circumcision doesn’t really prove that it’s the cause. The numbers are far too small to draw a correlation.
But I summarize to no avail, because you don’t really care if circumcision hurts a kid or not. It’s enough (as far as I can tell from your postings) that it’s a permanent mark left by a religion. You make no argument as to why that’s bad - it’s not like the kid’s dick is booby-trapped to explode if he ever skips going to synagogue. I’d imagine that, if the kid chooses to leave the religion, the permanent mark it necessarily leaves on his mind is a much bigger deal.
No problem, as it’s not! That was easy. (catsix, before you start your batshit insane rantings, provide some evidence.)
It’s authorized by law because it doesn’t hurt anyone. We make laws when there’s a problem that a law could fix. This isn’t a problem, so there isn’t a law. Easy, huh?
Cathode has already pointed out that rather unusual practices on the part of Santería practitioners are permitted.
Sensation and pleasure aren’t the same. Sensation may be lessened (the mucosal tissue does change in texture, although that’s not exactly proof) but the brain has a marvelous capacity to feel any sensation exactly as much as it needs to. There are some people who have less sense of taste than most folks, and there are supertasters, who have far more. They do seem to have some differences in the foods they consume, but that doesn’t mean that the enjoyment of food is less in one group than in another.
:: looks over at the tarot cards on his bookshelf ::
That’s very nice. Fortunately, no one gives a crap whether you think their religion is well-founded or useful.
What’s the “for me” stuff? Do you favor banning religion, or not? Do you think that it’s appropriate to ban anything that upsets you, personally? Or are you responding to the immense numbers of extremist Jews in the USA, chasing little children around with knifes (“Come here, you little pisher! There’s a part of your penis, Hashem wants it cut off already!”) Or those clay statues they keep bringing to life by writing the tetragrammaton? Do older Jewish women keep harassing you to settle down with a nice Jewish girl, one who keeps kosher, and give your poor old mother some grandchildren already? I mean, seriously, what have the Jews done to you?
(And I’m talking about the USA. If you think Israel-Palestine is really a religious issue, I’ve got a kosher bacon cheeseburger to sell you.)
So what if you’re not religious? I’m not either. That doesn’t mean that religious folks are wrong. My views aren’t everyone’s, and I know my perspective isn’t sufficient to declare something like this wrong on the basis of morals alone. Sure, I don’t think circumcision’s the greatest thing in the world. But it doesn’t seem to do much harm, and eliminating it would. It’s the perspective that you have the moral authority to make other people’s decisions that leads to the extremism you’re so pissed off about in the first place.
You’re trying to convince the rest of us to ban the central practice of a religion. That’s oppressive.
I’m not sure you’re aware, but circumcision is permitted for non-religious reasons as well. In fact, before the batshit insane catsix started demanding we stop the Jews from doing it, we were discussing it in a secular context.
Interesting example. I certainly don’t support a parent’s right to deny a kid real medical care (since that actually does hurt children) but Jehovah’s Witnesses, with their ban on blood transfusion, have actually apparently come up with some pretty innovative surgical techniques. You know, through their superstitious tarot card reading.
Yeah, I heard you plenty of times. I don’t care because it’s a completely insignificant decision from a nonreligious standpoint, and it’s a pretty big one to Jewish people. So what’s the big deal? Like I said, he’s free to leave the religion. His dick won’t explode as a result.
Yeah, cause preventing a kid from going to a normal school, or teaching them that gay people (or black people, or whoever) are evil - why, that doesn’t matter! The kid’s dick is paramount!
Yeah, because the amputation of a digit is totally comparable to cutting off a small piece of skin!
What you guys are missing is that the reason this isn’t a problem to the rest of us is that it’s such a minor, minor change! Losing a toe is a hell of a lot more likely to cause problems to a person.
If you want to make a law banning something, you have to prove why. You want to change the status quo. As it is, parents can circumcise their kids. If you want to justify a change to that, you have to prove why.
Sure, on the basis of an individual child, the decision is different. If I were to have a child, I would leave him intact, since there’s not a good reason, not being religious, to do it.
However, if you want to change society - by banning something - yes, you are expected to prove why. And it goes beyond your own feelings. Logic’s a bitch, eh?
Me neither. I think parents should be able to make the decision regardless of religious beliefs. Plenty of parents who aren’t Jewish or Muslim get their kids clipped, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t be allowed to.
No one would. But the fact that cutting off a toe is quite likely to hurt you, you still wouldn’t be allowed to practice it. No judgment based on the legitimacy of the religion, just on the harm caused by the practice.
No proof that circumcision, beyond one case in a hundred thousand or so, causes harm to a child’s health. Formula feeding a kid isn’t good for it either. You wanna be the booby police as well as the penis police?
Babies do not have the full compliment of rights that adults do. They can’t, for example, purchase alcohol. And they don’t have religious beliefs. If you’re so concerned about a baby’s religious beliefs being violated, you better stop a parent from exposing it to religion at all. Because no one would tolerate anyone forcing an adult to attend a church they didn’t believe in, for example.
You acknowledged before that we had sufficiently argued that. There has been a citation from the Torah, there have been multiple attempts by Jewish folks to explain why, exactly, a ban on child circumcision does amount to a ban on Judaism. Would it end the religion in this country? Probably not. It would just mean the mohels would have to operate underground. I’m not really that comfortable with that notion.
No, dear, when you want a new law, it’s up to you to explain why it’s needed. New to debate?
I should hope it wasn’t.
I’ll assume you meant to say “germaine”. And no, the religious beliefs of the parents aren’t germaine to the discussion, since we were arguing over the merits of circumcision in a completely secular context. It’s only when catsix began her batshit insane rantings on why Jews shouldn’t clip their kids either that the religious element entered the discussion.
But you’re right, there’s no reason non-Jewish, non-Muslim parents shouldn’t have every right to clip their kids. And, fortunately, they do!
I’m sorry, but comparing FGM with circumcision is idiotic. They are very different in purpose, and they are drastically different in result.
There’s no assumed about it. Any child born to a Jewish mother, is Jewish. As the boychik is already a Jew as soon as he finishes emerging from the birth canal, he gets circumcised.
Not according to your link. The Government Response page contains only two responses that are not form letters. Brown says that he’d support the bill only if doctors decided circumcision was unsafe and recommended against it. Woolsey says that she supports male circumcision as a religious ritual.
The Jews against circumcision website is full of debunked arguments from the Dr Laura letter, and errors of all kinds.
Maimonides wasn’t just a revered sage. He was a doctor. This gave him a tendency to try and explain the commandments in medical terms(He concluded pork was prohibited because it was somehow ‘injurious to the body’). He gave his opinion (the quote on the site even contains the words “in my opinion”). To claim that his explanation is the real reason behind the command to circumcise is misleading, and baseless.
More, it doesn’t matter why G-d commanded us to do a thing. Some Jews have decided the ban on pork is really there to protect us from trichynosis, and that if they eliminate the risk of trichynosis , they can eat all the pork they want. Wrong. Regardless of the reason, the law still applies.
I
Just to clear up this point.
One of the things our society turns on is respect for physical integrity of the person. Every breach of that integrity is a crime unless:
The person is subject to legal restraint, or
- The person gives informed consent or
- If the person is unable to give that consent, the procedure is in the best interests of the child.
- To be in the best interests of the child there must be a sound medical reason for the procedure.
There isn’t in the case of circumcision. That it is permitted is simply an anomaly of selective non-prosecution for cultural reasons.
To clarify, children are not property. Parents do not have the right to do as they please with children.
Hrm. They are both circumcision. They are both genital mutilation. Note the law is specific that you can’t legally circumcise a female child in the U.S. But, currently, you can legally circumcise a male. I see little significant difference between removing a small piece of skin from the female genitals and doing same to the male?
Speaking of religious exemptions and such is all just ear-tugging and solution speculation. The heart of the matter is whether it is harmful. If it is harmful to the female, why not the male? It is a useless procedure yet babies
die from it. It is a useless procedure that causes them great pain . Yet we continue to argue here about whether it is harmless?
I just can’t wrap my head around the idea of a harmless procedure that causes pain and the risk of death to no purpose.
Learn to respect children. They are people!
The test isn’t “is it harmful?”
The test is “is it medically beneficial?”
You see little difference between removing a small fold of skin of the penis and the partial or total removal of the clitoris???
Are you serious??? :eek: :eek: :eek:
Actually, what you are referring to is a clitorectomy and not what I was talking about at all. I was referring to circumcision of the clitoral hood, a “small piece of skin”. Doing so, in the U.S., is illegal. But only if you do it to a girl.
I guess my point is this:
I agree with you that it’s a symbolic expression of their beliefs, and i agree that it’s done under the assumption that they will grow up with those beliefs.
However, since it’s common for non-Jews to get circumcised, the person is not physically any different than a Catholic, Protestant, or Atheist who happened to be circumcised as a child. The ***only * ** difference is in the fact that they view it as a covenant with G-d, and that view is entirely mental – They can decide to deny or keep that covenant at will, regardless of what the Jewish community feels on the matter. Last time i checked, the Jewish community didn’t get a say in free will.
Certainly the ‘mark’ is still there. But the ‘mark’ is also on millions of other people of a variety of other religions. So of course while it was intended to represent a belonging to a particular religious group, if someone rejects their participation in that group it ends up just being another meaningless facet of that person, just like the millions of other people who are circumcised. I don’t sit up at night thinking about what my penis means, it just is, and i’m fine with that.
And Dave, the reason i try to focus on Judaism as a religion rather than an ethnicity is that i like to allow for the possibility that someone of any ethnic group can be Jewish. The argument actually becomes easier if you treat this from an ethnicity standpoint – “engraving” them as part of a certain ethnicity without asking them seems easier to swallow, since you’re not going to be changing ethnicities any time soon. And they don’t have to be consulted about it – their ethnicity is already chosen at conception!
Of course, it’s still a medical procedure done without their consent, so the same objections will probably still apply.
A quick scan of the footnotes reveals
3 cites which report deaths due to mohel circumcision. 2 occured before the 1920’s. The third has no hyperlink and doesn’t appear in to be in English. Considering the other distortions and misrepresentations on the cite, I see no reason to trust a footnote with no link.
A bunch of deaths due to anastesia. Which mohels don’t use.
A few deaths due to African groups in which the person performing the circumcision has no training. I think we can all agree that untrained folks shouldn’t be circumcising anybody.
Re Pain
I laugh in your general direction. We’ve been circumcising without anasthetics or analgesics for a few thousand years now. If the babies’ reactions were really that severe, I’d think we’d have noticed by now. Does it hurt? I honestly can’t remember, but I’m goin with yes. Is this pain some severe, lifethreatening, neurochemistry altering experience? I’m going with no.
I felt that if I didn’t start picking out specific names, my question would have been blown off indefinitely. 
Okay, fair enough. And I thank you for your response.
The thing I don’t get is, why is it that my grandfather wasn’t an ogre for “cutting off some skin” off of my dad, but others who do it to their children are in the wrong? My grandfather was convinced that he was doing the right thing. He had personal experience to back up his reasoning (didn’t like being uncirumcised), but he still had someone cut something off of his son. A helpless baby! The poor kid had no say in the matter!
Now, bear in mind I have no real stake in this debate (cut, uncut, don’t care), but I don’t get it. If my grandfather wasn’t an ogre—doing something to his son because he (grandfather) believed it was best—why are other parents who have their sons circumcised so out of line? I have to assume that they are having their sons circumcised because they honestly believe it’s a good thing for their children. They have their children’s best interests at heart. They don’t believe that they are harming their children. So what makes them so different from my grandfather?
And just so CATSIX won’t think I’ve forgotten her, I still await her answer to my question as well. Thank you!
To be completely honest, my personal jury is still out on the religious exemption idea so I can’t comment on the procedures as performed by a mohel. Here in Kansas, there weren’t a bunch of mohels offering their services to me when I gave birth last year. But, again, I can’t wrap my head around a harmelss procedure that is medically useless but pain and holds a risk of death.
Is the pain a “evere, lifethreatening, neurochemistry altering experience?” I don’t know either. Unfortunately, the little tikes don’t speak English well at that age (nor yet, in my case) so I can’t question them about it. But, it’s a given that it hurts… a lot.
Spooje, I went back and read what Cecil had to say on the matter as well. I guess the point I was trying to make to you is even the slightest nick to the genitals of a female is illegal. But not if it’s a boy. Seems strange to me that all of the men arguing this point don’t see the unfairness in that. If there were legislation protecting the male genitals from surgery without consent but no such legislation for females…well, I know a bunch of us girls would be picketing the White House lawn. But you guys don’t seem to mind it much.
I’d like to see you try to remove the clitoral hood from a male.
Well, the purpose of female circumcision is to inhibit the enjoyment of sex. If I felt that had happened to me, I would be picketing the White House lawn, I assure you. If it’s purpose was to deter me from masturbation, it failed miserably.
Of course, It was done to me at a time when it was pretty much automatic. It was just something the parents did and I don’t think much questioning went on. I think questioning is a good thing. And as I said before, if it’s not necessary, maybe we should consider not doing it, except as a religious rite.
Mohels generally don’t lurk around maternity wards, waiting. They advertise. Though I was genuinely surprised that they are no mohel ads in the yellow pages (Philadelphia has Jews like Mom’s soup has matzoh balls), you can easily find mohel ads in the many local Jewish publications, or you can simply call the nearest synagogue.
As I said, there are important differences in how a mohel performs a circumcision- no anasthesia, no electrocauterization, etc. Additionally, the mohel is a specialist.
Yes. Yes, they do.
Hey Doc, I got a question, and was wondering if you knew the answer, or maybe Zev will. How much do the services of a mohel cost?