Argument from ignorance. “We don’t know, therefore it might be true.”
Is there any evidence to suggest this is anything beyond a non-sexual religious practice?
What sort of evidence would you accept? Penile plethysmography on the mohel as he’s servicing the baby? A porn website that specializes in rabbi-infant fellatio? (God, please don’t let that exist…)
The exact same thing could be said of your position.
Does female genital mutilation have a sexual component to it? I don’t think practitioners of it get turned on by the procedure itself, but if it doesn’t involve sex I’m a monkey’s uncle.
To get back to the topic at hand, is there any religious reason they can’t just use Handi-wipes?
Yes. The practice itself involves very brief suction and seems unlikely to satisfy a deviant sexual desire on its own, so I’d accept any evidence of these mohels being involved in pedophilaic practices apart from a very public and very brief religious ritual.
No, it cannot. Because my position isn’t making an outlandish claim. It’s making a negative claim – that a proposition is NOT true. In general, the person advancing the positive claim must provide proof.
I never claimed anything. I simply pointed out that what you claim is not a proven, it’s your opinion.
I love the SDMB, the home of fighting ignorance (as long as such ignorance does not assist our preferred policy positions).
Why am I the only person in this thread defending this practice against accusations of pedophilia?
The phrase “You can’t prove a negative,” while not literally true in all circumstances, exists to address this kind of nonsense.
My argument is via [url=“Inductive reasoning - Wikipedia”]. If we assume the truth of the opposite, we would expect to see other evidence of pedophiliac practices among mohels. We do not.
It is not accurate to relegate this to simple a matter of opinion.
The fact remains that it’s your opinion, nothing more.
I’m not even arguing that mohels are pedophiles but you can’t know that some subset are not.
Answered your own question before you even asked it, dintcha?
Getting back to the topic…
Is there a religious necessity for the use of the mouth or can the procedure be updated to use a sanitary wipe without violating any religious law?
Molesting a child and not enjoying it does not make it okay. In fact, it seems even more ridiculous if that’s even possible. What about the baby? Do you think he has a clue why this bizarre thing is happening? If you found out your babysitter was sucking your infant’s penis daily, would that only matter if they were getting off on it? Maybe it’s part of a research project they are conducting. Maybe they ran out of wet wipes. Do you assume the child is unharmed as long as the fellater has non-sexual motives?
This isn’t a “framing” of the issue, it’s a factual description of what is happening. The fact that some of the fellaters are infecting the babies with a potentially fatal virus is the icing on the cake. How anyone think sucking baby dicks is a privilege worth preserving is beyond me. This kind of “reasoning” is NAMBLA all the way. If I hired a Catholic priest to suck my kid’s dick, would you defend that too?
Because you show not the slightest bit of willingness to understand that “stop sucking baby dicks” is a rhetorical device and is not meant in any way as an accusation of pedophelia.
Undoubtedly some subset is. I certainly don’t argue that no mohel in the history of Orthodox Judaism has been a pedophile. That, too, would be an extraordinary claim on my part.
I argue that the practice at issue here, as a general principle, is not motivated by pedophilia, and any argument against the practice which suggests that the practice is motivated by pedophilia is wrong. This is not a claim that there are no pedophile mohels. It’s a claim that the general practice is not an expression of pedophiliac desires.
I agree with you on this position.
That said I’m still wondering if the practice can be updated to avoid potential injury.
Is there some religious dogma that specifically requires the use of the mouth as opposed to a sanitary anti-bacterial wipe?
It’s factual to describe them as “fellaters?”
No, it’s not. It’s deceptive. It’s inaccurate.
Well?
But isn’t the fact that some may be pedophiles (and that the practice may even attract some to the profession) sufficient reason to consider banning the practice, considering that there is no good medical reason for it?
No. I agree with the proposed law – requiring informed consent from the parents – but not with a total ban. Considering the extreme brevity of the contact, and the public nature of the event, it’s hard to see how it could be harmful (beyond the transmission of disease, which is not implicated by the pedophilia angle at all.)
We would not ban a doctor from performing hernia checks by holding testicles and eliciting a cough, even though there are undoubtedly pedophile doctors in the land.