I’m a big fan of technical accuracy because, as a general proposition, technical accuracy is correlated with actual accuracy – that is, the more precisely defined the terms of a discussion are, the more clear and precise the exchange of ideas.
So I’m not generally seeking technical accuracy for its own end, but rather to ensure that the discussion is clear and focused.
In this case, though, that goal is thwarted. Under the guise of technical accuracy, the words used insinuate salacious and perverse acts.
But as it happens, further technical accuracy would save the day. I wouldn’t object to “apply brief oral suction to the circumcision wound.” That’s a far MORE technically accurate description than “sucking baby dick.”
The temporary (and culturally-approved and religiously-mandated) application of wrinkled lip to wrinkled and recently-circumcised infant schlong coinciding with the creation of an oral vacuum, or TCARMAWLWRCISC for short, is the appropriate phrase, if we’re really going to get technical. But in the interest of brevity I will happily accept “sucking baby dick.” The thread is supposed to be about TCARMAWLWRCISC but you’ve transformed it into an argument over whether discussion regarding TCARMAWLWRCISC is best-served by describing those tender and innocent cock kisses as “the sucking of baby dick.” You are a foreskin-cleaving knight of the Order of the Bris, defending the names of those poor souls whose only crime is making it to third base with infants. I hope next to see you in a thread about rape demanding that people say “he practiced the vaginal insertion of his blood-engorged phallus with a non-consenting party” rather than “the bastard fucking raped her.” You are a champion of the light and I wish you Godspeed.
No, it’s not. Your first post in the thread references descriptions of dick sucking. Every single post of yours that I’ve replied to has been about those references. Suddenly, you’re talking about kissing.
Now, I may not have been on this Earth for as many years as you have, but my time here has indicated that there is a difference between kissing and dick sucking.
It reminds people that cutting baby cock is mutilation, and results in pain and bleeding, as compared to ‘circumcision,’ which is emotionally distant and calculatedly bland, like ‘collateral damage,’ ‘enhanced interrogation technique,’ and other double-speak.
I imagine you’re referring to “female genital mutilation.”
Here again we suffer from imprecision if you’re seeking to use this as an analogy. Male circumcision involves the removal of the foreskin of the penis. The World Health Organization classifies a number of different operations as “female genital mutiliation:”
[ol]
[li]clitoridectomy[/li][li]clitoridectomy and removal of the inner labia[/li][li]infibulation, which is a clitoridectomy, removal of all or part of both the inner and outer labia, and a stitching closed of the wounds leaving a small opening [/li][/ol]
These are a wide range of procedures, and not really comparable to circumcision, except in the base sense that both involve a cutting and the genitals. Are they?
But this objection is not limited to the “ultra Orthodox” rabbis – it applies to every Jewish circumcision, every Muslim circumcision, and every Gentile circumcision.
That’s what it is. If I want to defend circumcision (and I do), then that is exactly what I have to defend. I do defend cutting baby cock. I was there when the mohel cut my son’s. And if I have another son, I would do it again.
But people do find circumcision distasteful and outrageous, and it’s place in our society is highly contested. I defend the practice on its own merits and demerits regardless of how it is framed.
The same is true here. If this practice cannot be defended without sanitizing it, abstracting away from the graphic act itself, or characterizing it as some sort of banal religious ritual, then perhaps it is indefensible.
Show me where in the Bible, Torah, Koran etc. where God Moses Jesus Mohammed Abraham or anyone else important and all-wise said “cut up thy boys’ penises, for in two or three thousand years there wilt be something called “HIV” which willeth affect a people called “African men” and have nothing to doeth with thee and thine infants.”
Girls get more urinary tract infections than boys, cut or uncut.
Cutting off boy nipples will spare them the horror of nipple cancer, sure as shit. So?
You have zero ethical or moral right to cut up a child’s privates to prevent a theoretical infection in a theoretical person twenty or thirty or fifty years in the future, when those infections probably won’t even be problems anymore.
Finally, the academy itself said it doesn’t recommend routine circumcision. It’s right there. Dead.
Yes, it’s true that they don’t recommend routine circumcision. But I offered that evidence to rebut your claim that, “We’re talking about faith-based religious ritual with zero medical benefit.”
That’s true – a 0.001% chance is, I agree, effectively zero.
But the American Academy of Pediatrics study does not agree that the chances are as small as that. They say, contrary to your claims, that the health benefits of the procedure outweigh the risks:
Earlier in this thread, there was vast outcry at the primitive ultra Orthodox for their obstinacy in not following best medical practice.
Now, are we going to see the same storm descend upon you for rejecting best medical practice?
Ha! Ha! Yeah, hilarious, I know. But seriously, on what basis do you reject this study?
15.7% is a bit more than 0.001%, isn’t it? Five orders of magnitude, in fact, isn’t it?
Yes. And you responded that circumcision was mutilation, and thus worthy of the derogatory characterization. I contend that circumcision is a medical procedure with recognized medical benefits, that the American Academy of Pediatrics has determined that the medical benefits for this procedure outweigh the risks, and thus it’s NOT appropriate to use the derogatory term “cutting baby cock.”
That’s silly. Are we now supposed to call a colonoscopy “an anal ramming with a device” because some folks out there find anything to do with inserting stuff up the ass distasteful, presumably because of its sexual connotations?
Everyone knows what a circumcision is. There is no particular reason to adopt the most graphic possible language to describe it, and failure to do so isn’t “sanitizing” anything. It is simply using the proper and generally-accepted term.