Try Craigslist.
Do you have anything to swap? Are you flexible—would you settle for 2 twoskins?
There has long been an itch in the back of my mind that, besides the whole invasion thingies, all the French and Poles had against Hitler was that he wasn’t their right-wing racist. :o
The government has the right to make laws of neutral applicability across the entire population, even if those laws interfere with a religious belief. This is consistent with Supreme Court precedent, for example Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878). Congress outlawed polygamy, and the Mormons argued that this interfered with their religious duty to engage in polygamous marriage. Too bad, said the Supreme Court. The LDS Church adapted, and renounced polygamy in favor of monogamy. Notice that 140 years later, the Mormons are still around. We didn’t genocide them. They just had to slightly modify their religious practice to remain in accordance with the law of the land.
If American voters chose to outlaw circumcision, then it is perfectly acceptable in my view to arrest people who violate that law. It is over the top hysteria to label this “genocide.”
Cavaliers are a bunch of premature ejaculators.
Whoa there, this is way, way exaggerated and/or just plain wrong in so many different ways. For instance:
- Not being circumcised does not disqualify a male Jew or Muslim from being a Jew or Muslim. We’ve had this discussion in other threads, and halachically knowledgeable Jewish posters such as cmkeller have confirmed (as have numerous cited sources) that a Jewish man who isn’t circumcised is still Jewish.
Most Jewish and Muslim religious authorities believe that an uncircumcised man is not in full compliance with the laws divinely ordained upon Jews and Muslims, but that is a different thing. An uncircumcised Jewish or Muslim man can marry within his religion and father Jewish or Muslim children, so this panic about “in a couple generations there would be no Jews or Muslims” is nonsense.
- Prohibiting circumcision of non-consenting minors is not the same thing as eliminating circumcision altogether. AFAICT, even the most stupidly draconian proposal for prohibiting minor circumcision, such as clairobscur’s, does not restrict consenting adults from choosing to become circumcised, and significant numbers of Jewish and Muslim men would doubtless do so if it were forbidden to circumcise them as children.
(Note, btw, that many Muslim communities don’t circumcise boys until well into adolescence anyway, so deferring circumcision to legal adulthood would not be such a big step as it is for communities that practice only infant circumcision.)
- A small minority of Jews and Muslims already reject the doctrine that circumcision is mandatory for Jewish and Muslim men. Their numbers would probably increase somewhat if minor circumcision were forbidden, though doubtless not as much as the numbers of Jewish and Muslim men who undergo circumcision at adulthood.
:rolleyes: Oh, for shit’s sake. You make up an imaginary scenario to the effect that prohibiting minor circumcision would somehow cause the “extermination” of Jews and Muslims, which it would not, and then use that false claim to try to argue that clairobscur is “calling for” the “extermination” of Jews and Muslims because he wants to prohibit minor circumcision.
Ridiculous. I can criticize clairobscur’s proposal as draconian and tyrannical, and I do, without buying into your delusional alarm that it’s deliberately genocidal.
Well, that’s the matter of opinion that people are arguing about here. Your asserting “it’s just not” does not in fact settle the matter.
Sure, but there are many, many forms of minor surgical procedure involving amputation of a body part that we do not allow to be performed on non-consenting children when it’s not medically necessary. If we are going to insist on having an exception to this policy in the case of circumcision, ISTM that we need a logically and ethically consistent argument for drawing that line right in that place.
Look, I personally do not regard circumcision as a drastically invasive form of surgery (though I don’t have a penis so how would I really know?) and I have no problem with circumcised people, nor do I want to make them believe that their circumcision has seriously damaged them. But it would be absurd to try to deny that circumcision counts as a permanent surgical modification of the body.
People who believe that bodily integrity is a human right, and there are many people who sincerely believe that, are often sincerely opposed as a matter of principle to allowing minor children to be deprived of their bodily integrity. You don’t have to agree with them, but I think you’re on very shaky ground if you’re simply assuming that their principles are merely a smokescreen for religious bigotry.
Does the permanent and medically unnecessary surgical removal of any naturally occurring body part count as “causing no harm whatsoever to the child”? If not, exactly which body parts, and how much of them, can be removed before “harm” is considered to have occurred?
See, my point here is that the insignificance and harmlessness of circumcision does not depend on your say-so. It is a point on which reasonable people who genuinely care about the well-being of children can disagree.
Even people who are entirely unreasonable about, say, the recommended punishment for parents violating hypothetical laws against circumcision of minors are not necessarily being unreasonable or disingenuous in their objections to the practice itself on ethical grounds. You can certainly disagree with their opinions, but if you just default to immediately writing them off as Nazis then I think you’re being illogical and ignorant.
I was not in fact trying to “gotcha” you with grammar. I genuinely did not understand, from your reference to “a specific minority group (one which has a long history of being victimized by discrimination and persecution)”, that you were still talking about both Jews and Muslims as suffering from the impacts of a hypothetical ban on minor circumcision.
See above for why your say-so is not sufficient to determine what qualifies as “harm” to children.
OK, so how about the overwhelming consensus of medical opinion? How about the American Academy of Pediatrics? Are they qualified to determine what constitutes harm to children? If not, who do you think is so qualified?
Bottom line: clairobscur has proposed to violate the human rights of my people on a massive scale, in the name of pseudoscientific bullshit. I don’t owe it to him to carefully consider his motivations in order to avoid casting unfair aspersions, he owes it to me to STFU.
Uh, nowhere do they say that circumcision doesn’t involve harm to children. Circumcision results in a surgical wound accompanied by pain and bleeding, along with the permanent amputation of the foreskin and risks of far more serious damage. Of course that constitutes harm of some sort to the child, to which the child has not consented and cannot consent.
What the AAP says is that in the long term and in the aggregate, the physical harm done by the circumcision procedure and the risk of greater harm from complications of the procedure are minor enough to be outweighed by the potential medical benefits. Note, however, that that opinion is not shared by other pediatric bodies, which hold on the contrary that the disadvantages of circumcision outweigh its medical advantages.
So the question for a society to address is, how much and what sort of harm in the form of permanent surgical body modification is it okay to submit non-consenting children to, and for what reason(s)?
Notice that I haven’t claimed that society is ethically obligated to prevent children from suffering any harm of any kind at the hands of their parents. That would be impossible, because children are always going to get harmed to some extent by something. The issue is how much and what sort of harms we consider acceptable, and what motives are considered acceptable to justify inflicting those harms.
Many people argue that the principle of bodily integrity—that is, not permanently modifying a child’s naturally occurring body unless it’s medically necessary—should be one of the “bright lines” separating acceptable from unacceptable harm levels. As I said, you don’t have to agree with them about that, but I think you’re way out of line in jumping to the conclusion that it makes them Nazis.
Remember, almost all forms of medically unnecessary cutting or wounding a child’s body, even if the physical damage is slight and heals without leaving any permanent trace, are not considered acceptably humane in our society. If we’re going to say that a few such procedures—circumcision, ear piercing—should be tolerated while most others—tattooing, scarification, FGC, etc.—should not, then IMHO we need a fully consistent logical justification for where we’re choosing to draw that line.
I couldn’t find any pediatric organizations in your link opposing male circumcision. I did find a criticism of the AAP guidelines by the authors in the article.
I trust your statement is accurate; it’s just not directly supported by your link. Admittedly I might have missed something: if so a quote would be nice.
I would propose that we don’t try to tell the actual Jewish person what is and is not antisemitism, any more than we should tell a woman what is and is not misogyny.
And, well, if someone is really passionate about an issue that causes no harm when done correctly and carries little risk, and disproportionately affects a certain group of people, it is normal to think that someone has a problem with those groups of people.
And when someone says they’ll try to take your kids away from you for practicing a part of your religion, I think everyone has the fucking right to condemn said people as hating your religion. Especially when there is a long history of bigotry towards your religion.
The counterargument to that, of course, is the position that prohibiting infant circumcision is defending the human rights of the nonconsenting people who are being circumcised.
I don’t have a strong feeling about which of those interpretations of human rights—i.e., the right to follow one’s traditional religious practices including performing permanent medically unnecessary surgical body modifications on non-consenting children vs. the right to maintain bodily integrity by not being subjected to permanent medically unnecessary surgical body modifications that one has not consented to—ought to outweigh the other, or even if either of them deserves to be considered inalienable even in the absence of the other.
But ISTM that the advocates of the first position have no defensible justification for simply dismissing or ignoring the advocates of the second position by asserting that their stated principles are really nothing but a screen for religious bigotry.
:dubious: Careful, there: if we’re talking about pseudoscientific bullshit, some might inquire why we’re supposed to accept that the alleged decree of an imaginary supernatural being to Bronze Age pastoral tribesmen should count as a valid justification for subjecting non-consenting children to medically unnecessary surgical procedures in the first place.
Mind you, I’m not denying that according to stringent scientific criteria, many of the claims made by anti-circumcision activists about reasons against circumcision seem highly exaggerated and/or dubious. But let’s not forget that according to stringent scientific criteria, the claims adduced by circumcision advocates about the fundamental reasons for circumcision are no better than flat-out mythical.
Maybe not, but I think you certainly owe it to yourself, as well as to other posters. You don’t want to clutter up the boards with unfair and illogical arguments when you can avoid it, do you?
Your assumption is that Jews would be bullied into submission. Coincidentally, we are currently celebrating a holiday in remembrance of a time when some other folks thought that. It didn’t end well for them. Yes, a Jew doesn’t have to be circumcised to be a Jew, and an uncircumcised Jewish man could father uncircumcised Jewish sons, but they wouldn’t. They would circumcise their sons, and their sons would be confiscated by the State and raised by strangers, and in a couple generations there would be no more Jews worthy of the name. Or, more prosaically, we’d just do what we’ve always done in these situations and take our highly educated asses to benefit the economy of some country where hatred wasn’t in fashion at the time.
In addition to being unacceptable from a perspective of Jewish law, deferring the decision until the man is an adult isn’t acceptable because adult circumcision carries significantly greater risks and longer recovery time than infant circumcision. The first Medline abstract I could find:
[spoiler] A ‘snip’ in time: what is the best age to circumcise?
AU
Morris BJ, Waskett JH, Banerjee J, Wamai RG, Tobian AA, Gray RH, Bailis SA, Bailey RC, Klausner JD, Willcourt RJ, Halperin DT, Wiswell TE, Mindel A
SO
BMC Pediatr. 2012;12:20. Epub 2012 Feb 28.
BACKGROUND Circumcision is a common procedure, but regional and societal attitudes differ on whether there is a need for a male to be circumcised and, if so, at what age. This is an important issue for many parents, but also pediatricians, other doctors, policy makers, public health authorities, medical bodies, and males themselves.
DISCUSSION We show here that infancy is an optimal time for clinical circumcision because an infant's low mobility facilitates the use of local anesthesia, sutures are not required, healing is quick, cosmetic outcome is usually excellent, costs are minimal, and complications are uncommon. The benefits of infant circumcision include prevention of urinary tract infections (a cause of renal scarring), reduction in risk of inflammatory foreskin conditions such as balanoposthitis, foreskin injuries, phimosis and paraphimosis. When the boy later becomes sexually active he has substantial protection against risk of HIV and other viral sexually transmitted infections such as genital herpes and oncogenic human papillomavirus, as well as penile cancer. The risk of cervical cancer in his female partner(s) is also reduced. Circumcision in adolescence or adulthood may evokea fear of pain, penile damage or reduced sexual pleasure, even though unfounded. Time off work or school will be needed, cost is much greater, as are risks of complications, healing is slower, and stitches or tissue glue must be used.
SUMMARY Infant circumcision is safe, simple, convenient and cost-effective. The available evidence strongly supports infancy as the optimal time for circumcision. [/spoiler]
The consensus of medical opinion is that the benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks, though in absolute terms both the benefits and risks are quite small. So the burden is hardly on circumcision advocates to explain why this “exception” needs to be made to usual medical principles. Those principles are that we do stuff that is associated with longer, healthier lives and avoid the opposite.
But in my opinion, the principle of respect for individual choice and the rights of minorities should prevail even if the scientific consensus changed as new evidence emerged that circumcision was actually slightly bad for you rather than a tiny bit good. Only if it were proven that circumcision is a serious risk comparable to vaccine refusal or total denial of medical care would it be appropriate for the law to become involved. And that is not gonna happen, because we’ve been doing this for 3000 years, mostly while living alongside people who didn’t, and if there were some massive difference in health outcomes we’d have noticed it by now.
I mean, I guess it’s theoretically possible that someone could want to commit massive human rights violations based on a belief that “bodily integrity is a human right” rather than on religious/ethnic hatred (much more likely IMO that the latter makes the former seem intellectually plausible). But like, so what? In that case, fuck them just as hard but for a slightly different reason.
OK, how about we draw the line at “procedures which have been practiced without obvious problems for thousands of years and are viewed as integral to the culture of some groups get grandfathered in”? Really, was that so fucking difficult? (incidentally, I believe there are some cultures which do practice ritual tattooing of minors, and I have no problem with that)
Well, I was referring to the statement of the authors about representing non-American medical organizations that express such opposition, but direct verification from several such organizations is easy to find.
Dutch medical association webpage containing link to PDF policy statement:
Royal Australasian College of Physicians
There are numerous similar official position papers of non-American medical associations on circumcision.
Thank you: to the best of my knowledge, it is.
That might be the case. But I wonder whether that’s most of the explanation. I assert 2 causes.
- See this rant, quoted for hilarity:
- But I say it relates the the universal male aversion to being kicked in the nuts. Some dudes overgeneralize and instinctively react to male infant genital snipping with hysteria and horror. Admittedly I’d be on stronger ground if dudes didn’t do this sort of jabbering all the time. I still contend that testicularimpactphobia plays a role.
2b. Obligatory quote: Every guy alive has (probably) experienced an unpleasant and painful blow to the balls. And it hurts for a reason. “Evolutionarily, it makes sense,” says Dr. Kramer. “Your body is made to reproduce. It protects itself from trauma to your genitals for survival of the species. So the testicles are privileged in that they have extra-sensory attachments to them that give you a lot of sensation when the testicles are ‘attacked,’ to protect your reproductive potential.” Your Balls Are Stronger Than You Think So that’s it folks. Once again we have yet another example of testicular privilege.
ETA: Thanks for the links Kimstu!
C’mon now. Primitive superstition shouldn’t have that much power in the internet age.
No, no, that’s religious bullshit. It’s a whole other category. ;)Pretending to respect each other’s religious bullshit while refraining from inflicting our own religious bullshit on others is one of the ways we avoid civil wars. Refusing to respect psuedoscientific bullshit is how we do science…
And you seem to be moving the goalposts here. Earlier you were pointing out, correctly, that most circumcisions in Western societies aren’t done for religious reasons, but based on perceived medical benefits and aesthetic reasons. But now you’re saying that religion is the “fundamental reason” for circumcision? I looked again at the American Academy of Pediatrics position paper and saw a lot of scientific studies cited, but no appeals to the authority of any bronze age deities.
To be clear, I don’t have any problem with people trying to talk other people into not circumcising their kids (I mean, other than they’re doing so based on stupid arguments, but whatever). It’s only if you call for State violence against those who disagree with you that I’m going to call you vile names.
Yes, it certainly is. What exactly counts as “obvious problems”? Clearly the people who have suffered damaging complications from circumcision have had “obvious problems” with it. Exactly where is the threshold for a level of negative outcomes that is considered acceptable? And how about the experiences of people circumcised within this cultural tradition who feel that even a medically normal circumcision produced “obvious problems” for them, and object to its having been done without their consent?
And then, of course, if we get all that figured out we have to determine what qualifies as “obvious problems” for procedures like the various forms of FGC, many of which have also been practiced for thousands of years.
Yes, this issue actually is pretty fucking difficult if we think about it carefully.
Well, that would be their choice to make (although I question the apparent bigotry of disparaging and excluding any Jews who would choose not to circumcise their minor sons as thereby being not “worthy of the name”).
While I completely concur that the risks and recovery time of adult circumcision are greater, I don’t see how that makes adult circumcision intrinsically “unacceptable”. After all, plenty of Muslim men get circumcised in adolescence and even in adulthood rather than in infancy. If an adult man wants to endure the risks and recovery time in order to comply with what he considers his religious duty, that’s his choice to make as a consenting adult.
No, that’s just the consensus of medical opinion within a particular American pediatric body. As discussed above, there is a great deal of medical opinion elsewhere that disagrees with them about that.
Well, I don’t have a problem with your holding that opinion. I just have a problem with your declaring that somebody who supports an opposing opinion should be assumed to be a Nazi.