You have an extremely optimistic opinion about the selflessness of men regarding the wishes of their partners.
It sounds to me like you’re simply conjecturing. We know that in the past Christian groups have condemned circumcision and we know that the rise of popularity of circumcision in Anglophone countries was due to its association with hygiene and what was presumed to be scientific studies that ‘proved’ its efficacy combined with the US military forcing adult recruits to undergo it to stop the spread of venereal disease. We know that it maintained its ascendancy in the US largely because of ‘cadillac insurance’ plans in the post-war era that incentivized doctors recommending a cheap, relatively easy surgery that was compensated fairly richly by those plans. The existence of circumcision in the US is really all about the failure of private pay healthcare rather than some convoluted idea that Christians in the 50s somehow wanted to become more Jewish to appease God or didn’t look into it closely enough because of God. The Brits in the 50s were just as religious as Americans, but their healthcare didn’t incentivize circumcisions, so the rates at which they were performed dropped. Trying to drag Christianity into the circumcision debate is ludicrous. It’s finding a villain and then figuring out why they are villainous.
Informed consent is a major issue. Even if you believe it’s a legitimate exercise of parental/medical authority, it seems to me that parents aren’t being fully informed as to the risks/benefits. They aren’t being told that there’s a controversy over whether the foreskin is a vestigial or vital organ. Since we live in a culture where circumcision is common (with rates as high as 90% in the 1970s) Many parents don’t know what a foreskin really is. They’ve never seen one, or had any experience with one.
If the foreskin arguably does have some value above zero, and plays a positive role in human sexuality, according to many European medical authorities, why aren’t parents informed about this?
He may have been a “well respected scholar of Jewish law and philosophy”, but he wasn’t much of a scientist. Contrary to “quieting the organ”, circumcision seems to make it more sensitive to stimulation.
Seat-of-the-pants guess: it didn’t occur to male doctors that quote-unquote “healthy” women would masturbate.
You are taking this as a personal attack, and I didn’t use “Christian” because beliefs differ so greatly to make it an almost meaningless category.
Many American Christians do unwittingly think this circumcision is the same as the circumcision rite mentioned in the Old Testament. Heck even in the case of Jewish people, Genesis 17:11 was interpreted to only remove the orlah which didn’t expose the entire gland. It was only after movements to de-circumcise after the time of Jesus that it was extended to remove the peri’ah.
Here is a medical like drawing to illustrate the differences.
Most US Christian denominations are neutral about male circumcision today, and almost all seem to think that peri’ah is biblical circumcision.
Again, no major medical organization in the world recommends infant circumcision and in most of the English speaking world the anti-masturbation fads of the 1800’s went away well over 50 years ago. Well except those who ignore the HIV risk differences depending on transmission means.
The Victorian obsession with Spermatorrhea as a moral disease is well documented
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24632197?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
As you want to claim that the Christian religion had nothing to do with the rise of circumcision how about you explain what morality they were using to justify the procedure?
By what non-religious means to you justify the fear of spermatorrhea and the acceptance of circumcision as a valid medical intervention in the late nineteenth century?
OK, if you want to get into the history of it. The first major circumcision advocate was a guy named Peter Remondino who was writing in the 1890s. You can actually read his book at Project Gutenberg (The Project Gutenberg eBook of History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present, by P. C. Remondino, M.D.) - the 161 page is bookmarked because that’s where he goes into why we should circumcise. He begins the chapter by saying that Christians don’t circumcise and they are idiots for it. He then goes into great lengths explaining that Jews live longer than Christians and then attempts to explain away other environmental factors and lands on the fact that circumcision prevents syphillis and tuberculosis. He feels that it’s a vestigial gland that evolution left behind and leads to cancer among other things. He thinks that it failed to evolve properly so that humans should remove it to better allow the functioning of the penis.
So, the ‘acceptance’ of it was not based on ‘Let’s get back to Yahweh’ religion, but rather a misinterpretation of evolutionary biology.
As an aside, I don’t take this as a personal attack on Christianity at all. I take it as trying to draw in a majority religion in order to justify oppression of a minority one. By saying, “Hey, I’m not against Jews and Muslims, I’m against Christianity as well, so not prejudiced.” it takes the focus off of the real victims of this Crusade by hiding it behind anti-Christian rhetoric which is more socially acceptable.
I think it’s unfortunate that it’s difficult to have this conversation, since I do think it’s conversation worth having, simply for the reason that involves babies and also surgery on genitals, and those are two serious subjects. But I can understand being opposed to the conversation, as well, because it is indeed often just a cover for anti-Semetic beliefs. And I also seem to recall that there have been times in history where circumcision has been banned as an open effort to eliminate Jewish religious and cultural identity.
While I still find that I can’t support circumcision, I’ve been educated in this thread as to just how seriously it is taken by many Jewish communities. I somehow doubt this issue is going to be resolved in this generation, and I do fervently hope it isn’t resolved by forcing mass groups of Jewish people to stop against their will or hide it.
Perhaps I’m just dreaming when I hope that, in a few generations, enough Jewish parents will find it iffy that they will not feel they must do it in order to pass on their cultural identity to their child. Well, even the form of circumcision used now is a change from that used in the past…
“desert demon Yahwe” is definitely not a productive start to a discussion, either, even if I feel the discussion has evolved past that.
Well going from rates as high as 90% in the 70s to rates arpund the 50% mark today (at least according to the sources ive read) implies to me that perhaps parents are more informed today than in decades past. Societal change (usually) progresses frustratingly slow. But we seem to be moving continously in the direction of being against pointless (and potentially harmful) circumcision. 80% of males currently alive in the U.S. may be cut but only ~50% of infants undergo the procedure today. Progress.
I might support a ban on it for strictly cosmetic or dubious/potential-based medical reasons. I suspect a minority of circumcisions are actually for religious/cultural reasons in the United States, still.
We’re still talking specifically about infant/minor circumcisions, though, right? Because personally, I would be vehemently opposed to any kind of ban on adult males voluntarily getting circumcised, whether for some nearly-negligible medical benefit, aesthetic reasons, religious reasons, or any other reason.
Circumcision, like facelifts or piercings or any other form of medically unnecessary minor body modification, should be legal for any consenting adult to procure. It’s only the circumcising of minor children without medical necessity that I think the anti-circ people have any justification whatever for opposing on human-rights grounds.
I would like to see non-therapeutic circumcision of minors banned. But I’m a pragmatist. I’d be willing to pursue policies which merely discourage people from doing it but don’t outright ban it, like expanding the requirements for “informed consent” to include watching a video of a circumcision being performed and showing them photographs of botched circumcisions. It’d be a similar approach to what pro-lifers have done with abortion. Supreme Court precedent prevents them from banning it entirely, but States are free to put significant obstacles in people’s way. In addition to that, not a single penny of taxpayers money should go towards any medically unnecessary circumcision.
It may be useful to have a debate with someone who is arguing that point.
I have repeatably stated that I personally think that prohibition is not possible, but as it is demonstrated to not be a CORE belief in almost all cases for the major religions involved, of which Jewish is an extreme minority, we know we don’t have to resort to laws that restrict religious freedom to address it.
Lets be clear, the US is an outlier being the ONLY western, first world, and christian country where infant circumcision is the general rule.
The fact that it is NOT a hard requirement of the top two largest Abrahamic religions shows what is possible not what is impossible.
To quote James Madison and Federalist paper 10 once again
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp
What is not useful is to pretend that religion and the US’s form had no factor in the current popularity.
While it would be awesome if Christian religious leaders would directly address this subject without question, the general views and morality are addressable here.
No minority group in the US is responsible for neonatal circumcision being one of the most common surgical procedures in the country.
False beliefs based on pietistic Protestant movements lead to an almost universal adoption of the practice in the UK and the US in the mid 1800’s just as happened in the Suni populations in an extra-cannon fashion.
It is quite a stretch to ignore the adoption of the practice outside of those facts, and if you can’t separate that from what you believe to be anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic desires the problem is with your own beliefs.
There is a vast divide between breaking down a system that actively encourages unnecessary operations and those which seek to deny the same under religious grounds.
You are simply providing a false dichotomy and to be honest are arguing out if bias for Christians as you seem to assume that all Muslims think circumcision is required. It is NOT and acceptance is just as complicated as any other religion but yet you are “othering” them into a monolithic group.
How about you check your own assumptions and quit assuming that all Muslims share the same exact extra-quranic beliefs.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time listening to the Intactivist community (people opposed to involuntary nontherapeutic genital modification) and nobody I’ve heard on that side want to ban it for consenting adults. However, on the pro-circumcision side there actually is a prominent advocate (Brian Morris) who wants to make circumcision mandatory for all children, even if the parents object!
While that used to be true it is now incorrect. IMC rates in the US are around 50% and declining so, in fact, the practice can no longer be called “the general rule” in the US.
Agreed.
Incoming radical idea
I suspect i won’t find a whole lot of support for this idea here but I’d extend the legality of medically unecessary cosmetic alterations to include anabolic steroid administration under care of a knowledgeable physician.
The risks of pretty much any surgery outweigh the risks of reasonable, medically supervised steroid use.* And there is so much misinformation and lack of information on the subject of AAS that even most doctors dont really have a good understanding of their true effects and side effects. And since it’s illegal to use supra-therapeutically, no studies have been conducted on yhe long-term effects of such use. I am drawing a distinction between androgenic, anabolic steroid use for cosmetic purposes and medically-necessary testosterone replacement therapy (TRT). The latter is only restoring a man’s T levels to what has been determined to be a normal level for a man today. The information gleaned from this therapy can’t be used to predict what the long-term effects would be on a man with already normal T levels using AAS in supra-therapeutic dosages.
So obviously, work would need to be done in order to make this a reality but i think it’s only due to fear-mongering and ignorance, on a cultural level, that truly stands in the way of such things ever happening.
*Although this cannot be stated unequivocally due to the status of AAS effectively being a Schedule 1 controlled substance, considered to have no legit medical value, making studies on it’s effects for cosmetic use off-limits. Just like marijuana. I say “effectively” because while they are actually considered Sch. III controlled substances, that status is based on medically beneficial, therapeutic dosages.
Sorry for the hijack. Carry on
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Yes, infant circumcision/circumcision with an inability to consent.
He’s long gone, but not forgotten.
To address what I believe to be a more important contemporary issue, I condemn the widespread practice of docking puppy tails. 
Let’s not forget the barbaric practice of declawing cats. Banned in numerous countries. Apparently house pets warrant more protection from cruelty than human babies.