My question in my earler post (which you never replied to, except to put me in a list of people calling mohels paedophiles) was "do you have any evidence that it is “manifestly untrue?”
When I was growing up in the '50s, no one would have believed that homosexually inclined young men would become catholic priests because it gave them free access to young boys. We now know that this belief was not based on factual evidence. In what sense is the concept that some men become mohels because they want to suck baby dicks “manifestly untrue”? You are apparantly a lawyer; isn’t it a rule of lawyering that you don’t make catagorical statements without some evidence that such statements are true?
What they are saying is that cutting your boy probably isn’t medically harmful. They also state there are no studies about psychological, emotional or sexual damage. Those are big deals to omit, judging by the apparent numbers of cut men who are unhappy about it for various reasons. Foreskin restoration was practiced by Jewish men in ancient times, and it’s still practiced today.
Are you implying that cut men are universally okay with being cut? I say they are not.
Religious, cultural and faddish cuttings, piercings, tattoos and body modifications should be left for (young) adults to decide themselves.
That’s a scoundrel’s slippery slope, and I can’t believe Bricker thinks you’re correct. We obviously don’t have to characterize everything in graphic terms by some made up person’s conceivable objection. That’s transparent nonsense. Practices that are actually contested matter here. If any non-imaginary people actually objected to colonoscopies on that ground, then yes, you would have to defend it because it is ramming an object up your ass. Sorry. Just like you’d have to defend eating, defecating (another generally-accepted polite euphemism), dihydrogen monoxide, or anything else some bogus hypothetical offenderatus might get excited about. No, wait, you don’t have to defend those things because they are not actually outrageous.
I care more about what is contested in the real world.
What is “proper” and “generally-accepted” is by definition a euphemism. It papers over the fact that people genuinely find them outrageous. Define the language, define the debate.
I am comfortable making the statement because there’s not a shred of evidence to support the idea some men become mohels because they want to suck baby dicks. There is, for example, nothing remotely sexual about the actual act they do; the sucking that is fellatio is not the same as the brief suction applied to the wound in this case. There is no correlation between pedophila and mohels. There is no evidence of a greater percentage of mohels being implicated in child sexual contact. In short, it’s manifestly untrue because there’s no evidence to suggest it IS true, and plenty of evidence to suggest it isn’t.
Bricker I understand where you’re coming from, I really do. However surely you can understand that there are people–myself included–who are shocked and revolted by the idea of an adult male placing his lips on a baby’s penis, an act most of us had previously associated with the worst sort of pedophile until we learned of this bizarre religious rite. And surely you can understand that people, when they learn of something that shocks and revolts them, often respond in a blunt and maybe vulgar manner.
ETA: this was not in response to your last post, which wasn’t there when I wrote this.
Absolutely.
I absolutely get that.
But isn’t the whole mission of this website to address those kinds of concerns, to fight ignorance, to learn that there’s a tiny fraction of cases in which which an adult male placing his lips on a baby’s penis is NOT associated with the worst sort of pedophile and modify our reactions appropriately?
I don’t remember exactly when I first heard of this – I grew up in a Catholic household and don’t have any cultural context for this rite. But I’m sure when I first heard of it, I felt revulsion and disgust.
But I am also sure that I didn’t continue screaming about how mohels were kissing baby dick after I learned what was going on.
My objection, Larry, is not to the initial shock and revolt. It’s to the enthusiastic refusal to get beyond it.
The actual mission of this website is to pass the time and provide distraction during downtime at work and home. The fighting ignorance thing is a slogan, along the lines of Coke saying it’s the real thing.
One way people pass the time here is by indulging in recreational outrage. This story is a gold mine for that. Absolutely no one here will be affected by these mohels, unless they want this kind of bris for their own children. So people are enjoying shaking their fists and posting.
And really, although I agree there’s no pedophilic intent here, this is not a healthy ritual to engage in. The OP’s story makes this plain. There are many ways Jews can celebrate God–going to synagog, celebrating Bar Mitzvah’s, giving to charity–without this weird unsanitary practice. One can even have a bris, but I would hope that during a bris, the circumcision would be performed according to 21st century hygenic standards.
I’m not really Jewish, but I have enough Jewish ancestry that I would have been persecuted under anti-Semitic regimes. So I appreciate your keeping an eye out for Jew bashing, especially on a board that contains a few Jew haters. But I don’t think that’s whats going on here, if only for the reason that this odd practice is carried out by a tiny minority of the ultra-orthodox.
I know I have said versions of that to avoid “blood sucking” which it also is. But that has other implications.
How should we describe it.
But lets see a non-medical professional cuts off the foreskin of a baby in a party atmosphere then uses his mouth to suck the blood off the wound, introducing his bodily fluids to the babies bloodstream.
All to fit in with some bullshit bronze age herdsman’s idea on how to mark his kin as special?
Yes this is fucked up beyond belief.
As for the lack of evidence, did you read the NYTimes article posted earlier? Of course there is no evidence that would convince a lawyer, since anyone offering such
evidence would be shunned, threatened, and harrased by the orthodox community. There was no evidence in the 1950s that catholic priests were molesting young boys; that didn’t mean that they weren’t, just that no one was willing to take on the archbishops and cardinals that would pile on them if they dared to make the charges public.
No-one in “the real world” fails to understand what a circumcision is. It is not a “euphemism”.
A “euphemism” is a generally harmless word, name, or phrase that replaces an offensive or suggestive one. This case is the opposite. Some tiny minority of offenderati are replacing in this context a generally-accepted and accurate term used by everyone with a more graphic phrase, purely to generate outrage.
Like I said, it is silly. You are arguing the exact inverse of what is happening. It is not the case that once upon a time everyone called circumcision “baby dick cutting”, until those mean old debate-defining baddies invented the harmless euphemism “circumcision” and forced people to use it, at which point everyone forgot what the procedure consisted of. If those who oppose circumcision requires inventing new dysphemisms and getting people to use them to win their debate, their side is pretty well a hopeless one.
No one has said there is.
No one has said it is.
No one has said there is.
No one has said there is.
That pedophilia strawman sure is taking a beating. You suck at this.
Well, when I entered the thread I quipped something about once you’re lopping a bunch of protective and erogenous tissue off infant boy cock, sucking penis blood isn’t really reason to suddenly get outraged. It’s already outrageous. Swallowing would be nutritious, less wasteful and more respectful of God’s little miracle.
Forcing circumcisionists to conform to the APA’s recommendations would essentially kill this orthodox “shithead” practice.
If you really want to adhere to the APA’s recommendations point by point, letter by letter then let’s do so. With pleasure! 
In the meantime, let’s also agree that an immediate moratorium on the practice would be appropriate since there is no evidence waiting has any medical risk associated with it.
Please stop enflaming the debate by using these emotionally charged words.
If you have to describe Bricker’s actions, can you instead say that Bricker has applied brief oral suction to the proposed argument.
And, for the record, I would not object if Bricker just stopped using a man made of a sterile glass pipettes or straws to further prolong the argument.
Why don’t you respond to Mapache with these points?
Then I have nothing useful to add. You’re telling me no one cares about getting facts straight here – they just want to vent their spleens.
OK, folks - sorry to have bothered you all.
Not as immediately apparent as that. First of all, the statistic you’re discussing may be the likelihood someone will contract AIDS if circumcised versus the likelihood they’ll contract AIDS if uncircumcised, whereas levdrakon is talking about the chance of something happening at all. Latest stats I can find shows there were 48k people diagnosed with AIDS in 2010. The majority of these were men, though heterosexual women are more vulnerable to infection than heterosexual men (as it stands, African Americans were also a risk group and are less likely to be circumcised). It’s difficult to extrapolate from these data alone to determine overall chance of contracting AIDS. For instance, we can’t just look at the whole population and determine the chance of contracting AIDS for a newly circumcised infant is roughly equivalent to the chance a United Stateser will have AIDS (about one in three hundred) if trends are downward. We also can’t determine the chance of getting AIDS in one specific year (~0.00015%) and then multiply that by the number of years sexually active, since number of years sexually active without using contraceptive and number of sexual partners in a given timeframe will skew the data.
In reality, you’re both looking at different statistics and the truth is somewhere between them.
Edit: Also, I have to find it funny you’d advocate for briefly applying oral suction to the penis of a baby over public funding for contraceptives as a means to combat AIDS.
Right, but what’s that got to do with this:
If you have a cite to demonstrate that infants do not have intestinal bacteria, including e coli, it’d be a lot handier.
If you remember the original, it goes “first they came for the communists”, then socialists and trade unionists. Slightly more pertinent to the US, IMO.
That said though, in a thread about disingenuous insinuations, perhaps we can make a pact. Critics of religion will stop insinuating that religious practices are motivated by paedophilia and defendants of religion will stop insinuating that their critics are motivated by fascism or anti-semitism. Sound like a deal? Or will Bricker continue to claim it was a meta-commentary?
It’s the other way around: if someone said, “I had to go to the doctor to have a camera jammed up my ass,” only an idiot would insist on correcting him. “You did no such thing; you had a colonoscopic procedure.”
Do you agree with levdrakon that there is zero, or effectively zero, medical benefit?
Who says I’m against public funding of contraceptives as a means to combat AIDS? I’m absolutely in favor of that.
I agree with this, and my comments were intended to highlight the ridiculousness of the opposing comments.
And if I said my doctor assfucked me with a camera dildo?
I submit that – at least for clarification purposes – many people would seek to confirm that a colonoscopy was the subject.