Appeals to tradition carry little weight considering how many absolutely inane things were done for years simply because they were ‘tradition’.
You’re talking about the removal of a person’s body part without consent. Why on earth shouldn’t there have to be some justification for this beyond ‘doesn’t seem to cause harm’?
It’s truly sad to me to hear that defending a person’s right to not have his body altered without his consent unless there are extreme circumstances is ‘nitpicking’ over ethics.
What’s what with these deep, psychological analysis on those against circumcision? Somebody cut off a piece of my penis when I was a baby and I’m upset about it, can’t it just be that simple? And Excalibre, how can you write such a damning diatribe against those who are naturally resentful about their circumcision, and then gloat that you still have your entire penis yourself?
For Jews and Muslims, “God says so,” is some pretty hefty justification. I don’t believe in the fellow myself, but since there’s no harm in it, let 'em go ahead and exercise their religious freedoms.
I’m sorry I made you sad. But it really just doesn’t matter all that much.
This same logic would keep me from cutting my son’s hair or trimming his toenails. The only reason I do these things if because of societal convention, right? We can’t have our kids looking like barbarians, can we? By your logic, doing either to our children is an unspeakable crime. I say the anti-circ crowd needs justification for their lunatic crusade, quite simply (listen closely here)
Because
It
Doesn’t
Cause
Any
Harm.
If you want to claim it does, I want more than anecdotal stories from people who say that wearing a Tug-A-Hoy changed their life. Quite simply, circumcision is a harmless custom that has been safely practiced for thousands of years. If everything you anti-circ people say is true is in fact true, why isn’t their any evidence? Proof. Peer-reviewed, replicatable proof. If the anti-circ side has any merit at all, why is it that they never produce anything other than anecdotes?
Personally, I don’t particularly care one way or the other. I am circ’d, my son is not, it’s not important to me at all. I just can’t stand to see, especially here, on this message board dedicated to fighting ignorance, people exploding with bombast and hysteria about fringe movements and beliefs, be it circumcision or be it alien abduction or be it The Protocols of the Elders of Zion without proof. If your belief has value, bring me some proof to evaluate, and I’ll see if it’s convincing. Until then, you’re just nattering and gromishing to thin air.
Again, there are other reason than “it doesn’t seem to cause harm”. And again, there are multitudes of things our parents choose for us, without our consent, that have lasting consequences, again, without our consent.
I spoke to a number of doctors when my son was small. The consensus was that it was done for sanitary and health reasons. My doctor explained about a number of infections that are possible with uncircumcised boy babies.
I weighed the information given and made my decision based on the medical opinions from the people whom I queried on the subject.
It seems that your main objection is the 'wthout their consent" issue. Well, again, our parents cause permanent changes to our psyches, life choices and so on and so on, in a NUMBER of ways. And all without our consent.
Most parents do the best they can and do what they do for what they believe will be best for their children. But, most, if not ALL of what they choose for us during our childhood, IS in fact, without our consent.
Which, as has been stated, is true of all kinds of decisions parents make for their children.
I don’t need an unlimited right, nor the right to circumcise any random person without their consent. All I want is for legal guardians of male infants to have the right to have them circumcised. IANALawyer or legal scholar, but I think the SCOTUS has never even heard a case on that issue.
Re Tradtion
I’m not saying ‘It’s a 2000 year old tradition, why stop now?’
I’m saying that Jews have been doing it that long with a high rate of safe, complication free circumcisions and have been having pleasurable sex.
You say we should stop because it is “risky”. Cite?
You say you have a Jewish friend who resents that his parents had him circumcised. I can name 20 of my friends who don’t. Since the Hellenic era there has been a tiny percentage of Jewish men who oppose circumcision. The overwhelming majority do not. I’m going to take a risk and say that CMKeller, Alessan, Scuba Ben, and Zev Steinhardt are just fine with their parent’s decision to have them circumcised. I’ll even go out on a limb and say Zev’s son (his name escapes me at the moment. But he looks so cute baking hamantashen) is fine with Mr and Mrs Steinhardt’s decision to circumcise him.
Well, OK, but… they’ll grow back, no? So when your son gets older, if he decides that he wants to grow his hair and toenails out to look like Jeremiah the Mountain Man, he can. But the foreskin ain’t growing back. That choice is no longer available to him.
I don’t really have a dog in this fight (my son is uncircumcised, but I didn’t feel the need to wave placards or get into message board fights about it), but that comparison seemed kind of, well, silly to me.
I will, I guess, never understand what makes you people think you have the right to have a ‘cosmetic amputation’ performed on a person who has no say.
That, to me, is just plain wrong. If you’re going to go cutting off someone else’s body parts, in my opinion, you better have a damn good reason. Saying that it ‘might’ prevent some unspecified infection, that it ‘is generally harmless’ or that it’s just a ‘personal religious’ belief doesn’t seem to meet that standard.
What is needed, I suspect - for those who want peer-reviewed journal citations - is a ‘before’ and ‘after’ study, done upon men who grew up circumcised, and then restored. ‘before’ would measure any number of things - satisfaction with their sex lives, experience of orgasm, etc, things that are subjective - and things that can be measured, such as sensitivity to touch, pressure, temperature etc. Then, 2 or 3 years later, test the same men again after they have done stretching techniques for restoration and have achieved 24/7 coverage.
Of course, if the attitude of the medical community is ‘men who want to do this have emotional or psychological issues, and could have really improved their sex lives 10X if they could come to believe that God is an egg’…then I guess a study like that won’t be done.
Of course, it can’t truly be randomized, because no ‘random’ population of men is going to go to the effort of tugging for years, while another ‘random’ group does not. So I guess the results would be skewed and invalid before they ever happened.
You’ve got it backwards, Sparky, and it wouldn’t even be hard to do. Contact men who converted as an adult to a religion requiring circumcision and had the procedure done and ask them about sex before and after. They could prolly be pretty objective about the experience.
The trouble with your suggestion is that you’d be starting out with a population of men who think there is something wrong with them, that they’ve been mutilated, harmed or whatever other reason they have for resenting being circumcised (after all, who else is going to waste months and years on a damnfool stunt like trying to “regrow” the foreskin). Don’t you think that might tend to skew the results just an itty bitty teensy weinsey bit?
So over the thousands of years it’s been practiced, I’m sure it’s killed a lot of babies.
Here’s a cite that discusses the concern over “masturbatory insanity” and its role in making circumcision popular in the U.S.
And I *am * a lawyer, so let me put to rest any notion that child abuse can be protected by the First Amendment. As long as a law has a non-discriminatory purpose and is enforced against all equally, it’s fine.
I wonder how those who think there should be a religious exemption feel about Jehova’s Witnesses’ and Christian Scientists’ rights regarding their children’s health.
I am truly perplexed about your constant and “taking it way too personally” protection of all things male. I’m not saying this meaning that it’s wrong of you to do it, if it’s something you truly DO believe in that deeply. I’m just perplexed as to why.
It just seems a teensy bit, I don’t know…forced and excessive (for lack of better terms) to me. As if you feel you HAVE to do this or you won’t feel worthy of consideration by the male half of the human race or something (NOT that that’s what you ARE doing, it just strikes me as a possibility from the things you say in many of your posts).
If it were just this thread, it wouldn’t even cross my mind. But it’s the accumulated tone of all of your previous posts on the horrendous wrongs done to males. Even when a thread isn’t about that, but is about say, things done wrong to women. And then the constant refrain in THIS thread about how it’s something that “was without their consent”.
Sorry, I don’t mean to switch to mom mode, but it just seems a bit confusing and perplexing. It could just be that it’s in type and not IRL, but this feeling strikes me regarding your general feeling about men. That is, that your defense of them, in such an over the top way, is something you MUST do, or you won’t be worthy of male companionship or something.
I mean I ADORE them too, they are awesome creatures, great for medicinal purposes :D, but they are able to fight their own battles. And they really won’t discard you if you don’t agree with every last thing they say, and take up the “cause” for them. Sorry, mom mode off.
Well, we could always do a study regarding the sexual pleasure issue on Korean men, according to this site (thanks Aeryn), 90 % of Korean men have circumcisions in their teens and twenties.
Good gracious, I had NO idea. What a bunch of kooks. Thanks again for the link.
What I’m telling people is that it’s wrong to cut off parts of other people’s bodies without the consent of those people, unless there is a concrete, immediate, and compelling reason to do so.
If you have to cut someone’s finger off to save their life, then the finger goes, but there is no valid reason to lop off the foreskin of a person who can’t agree to the procedure.
You aren’t my mother, and you should probably make some kind of effort to remember that.
As to your opinion of why I care what parts get cut off of other people, it says a lot more about you than me. Why you think everything I’ve said here is some desperate attempt to be accepted by men, I don’t know, but that’s a pretty fucked up notion.
That, however, doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that you’re making fun of my argument because it centers on a lack of consent. I would’ve expected a feminist to understand how important consent is when it comes to permanent change to a person’s body.
I said exactly opposite of that. I said if it were JUST this thread, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind. It’s the accumulation of that sort of posting by you in a number of threads, especially ones that were not at ALL about men, but were about women being abused, and which you somehow always seemed to have to add that “well men have it as bad or worse”.
I am not AT ALL “making fun” of your opinion. I disagree with it. And stated THOSE objections in a previous post.
My posts regarding the ways in which parents run our lives without our consent was NOT “making fun” it was an argument in all seriousness in disputing your reasoning as to why circumcision is wrong. In several of your posts here, that HAS been your main argument against it.
And my posts (as well as those of a few other posters) stated that was an illogical reason, as most of what our parents choose for us IS against our will. And many of those choices they make for us are as permanent, or nearly as permanent as a physical one such as circumcision.
Then in a separate post, I stated my confusion with what seems to be an excessive amount of “protection” for men and their foibles. I stated clearly that I did NOT in fact know what your motives were, but that based on your many posts in this, and other threads on the subject, that’s how it came across to me.
I don’t mean to speak for catsix (whose posts I agree with completely), but I imagine the outrage comes from the perception that whereas cases of female abuse are almost always condemned, male circumcision is generally thought of as no big deal- and when the most common justifications in favor of circumcision seem a tad “Lottery-ish” so to speak, then it’s easy to become frustrated to the point of anger.
But setting aside if your children were circumcised or if you were circumcised- isn’t it worthwhile to step back for a second ask if there’s any compelling for this practice to continue? Ignoring for the moment the religious aspect (which is a debate I don’t care to get into), why bother with the procedure? Some may say that circumcision isn’t a big deal, but even if that’s true that’s hardly a justification. Some say there are medical problems that may occur if the foreskin is left intact- do uncircumcised males have a significantly greater risk of developing a urinary tract infection or getting an STD? I haven’t seen anything that suggests that. And what about problems that might occur with the foreskin itself- such as possibly being too tight? Does that justify the procedure? Do we pre-emptively remove tonsils or the appendix since they might cause a problem later?
Without even getting into issues of morality, I’m against the practice simply because it seems to be so superfluous. Maybe someone could correct me on this…?