Well, this is a new tactic! Take an article you don't like, and claim the writer is under the influence of some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers you don't like either, and must therefore be wrong. I don't know if Brendan O'Neill has ever heard of Hobbes and Locke, but it doesn't much matter if he hasn't since -- let me break the news to you gently -- there have been some further developments in political and secular thought since 1704.

If O'Neill IS wrong -- and he is -- it's not because of a fanatical devotion to the British Empiricists, but because of a wilful refusal to admit that violence resulting from irrational beliefs is just as culpable and wicked as any other kind. Nobody can make you do stupid, vicious things like circumcising a baby without your consent; and the possibility that your consent comes from a religious upbringing is utterly beside the point.

Without commenting on the rights and wrongs of male circumcision (consenting adults only, perhaps?), one must firmly reject the conflation of the practice with female genital mutilation which can be used as a back door way of okaying genital assault on girls.

The difference is in the purpose. The purpose of female genital mutilation is to deprive women of enjoyment of sex. It is driven by malice embodied in certain "cultures" which we are urged to consider to be as valid as culture informed by the Enlightenment.

Anyone who participates in any way on this brutal assault on a girl, including spiriting her to debased countries to get it done, should get life imprisonment without parole. That includes parents, relatives, religious advisers and anyone else who joins in the coercion).

Robert Darby seems to suffer from a deficiency of logic. One is supposed to review the facts and from them draw a conclusion. What RD has clearly done is start with an opinion then try to cherry pick some facts (and ignore others) to support his prejudice.

Fact:

Children have rights, and the parents as the carers of the children are given the authority (within limits) to make decisions on their behalf with regards schooling, religion, and medical treatments. All this can be over ridden by the state if the decisions of the parents are deemed not to be in the interests of the child.

Fact:

Male circumcision has proven therapeutic value, which outweighs the risk of the procedure (according to the US paediatric body)

Fact:

Female circumcision whether a mere nick or the full mutilation has no therapeutic value what so ever, and causes either a small or large amount of harm respectively.

Fact:

The risk of harm, and the pain of the procedure is minuscule at 4 days old, but increases significantly after puberty.

Fact:

Socially female circumcision is intended to damage the girl's libido and control her, whereas male circumcision today is intended for hygiene, and for social inclusion.

Conclusion (for those not suffering from prejudice or intellectual impairment)

1- There is a huge difference socially, medically and ethically between male and female circumcision, and the comparison between the two is similar to the comparison between homosexuality and bestiality, that got CB in trouble.

2- The increased deleterious effects of male circumcision after puberty (compared to at birth) render the argument that the decision should be left to the child ridiculous (similar to a 12 month waiting period for abortions)

3- Given the lack of ill effects of male circumcision, and small but significant benefits, this clearly lacks any justification for the state to consider banning or even recommending against the procedure.

4- Given the paucity of his arguments and the extensive effort he has given to ban male circumcision, I suspect Robert has a foreskin fetish.

@Shadow Minister: "The ... pain of the procedure is minuscule at 4 days old"

Ah, so all that screaming and sobbing is just the babies trying to put us off. Tricky little buggers, aren't they?

Would you care to explain how you come by this information? Someone who can communicate with four-day-old babies would be an enormous asset to any maternity ward.

>>Given the lack of ill effects of male circumcision, and small but significant benefits<<

Are any of these small benefits the sort you can't get by practicing safe sex and basic personal hygiene? Cutting off a baby's foreskin seems a bit excessive when there are other ways to combat the problems that circumcision helps with. Circumcision is a very safe procedure but there are risks - what do you do if you're one of the unlucky ones? Why take the risk in the first place?

Cheers,

Tony

JJ,

We had my son circumcised after discussing this with a paediatrician friend of mine. The urologist used an anaesthetic cream and the correct equipment to protect the child. There was no screaming or sobbing, less even than when he had his vaccinations. (would you consider vaccinations a violation of his human rights?)

I imagine things might be different with a Rabbi (or any other non health professional) and no anaesthetic, but my point is precisely that the procedure done properly is safe, relatively painless, and has small but enduring health benefits.

TL,

I agree that the benefits of this 2 minute procedure can be compensated for with a lifetime personal hygiene regime and continuous safe sex (from which no one deviates?). The risks of vaccination can be avoided by staying away from other people that might be sick.

What is your point?

I believe that genital mutilation is wrong, boys and girls alike - perhaps I'm wrong and SM is right, but that's besides the point I'm raising.

Many things we do are wrong. The problem with this article is the all-too-common assertion as if the fact that practice X is wrong permits the king/state to outlaw it, as if the king or state has any authority (and true wisdom) to tell right from wrong.

Talking about wrongdoing, one of the worst things we do is to create states, hand our personal power over to them, then allow them to use violence to enforce our collective ideas of right-and-wrong over others who never in the first place consented to be subject to those states, only because they too happen to live on this same planet or a specific geographical area thereof. One cannot get much wronger than that.

How much worse still when religion is involved, when people have the insolence to claim that their state knows better than God (or at least better than other people's gods)!

Then to argue against parents' authority over their children, while holding onto the idea of state's authority, is ultimate hypocrisy. The Jewish expression is of "one who takes a purifying ablution while still holding the unclean animal in his hand".

At least one can argue, as do the Eastern religions, that a baby gets to choose his/her parents, in order that they will best serve his/her religious progress, hence parents are in the best position to decide what's good for their baby. While you may not agree with the above, you should at least give parents' authority the benefit of the doubt over the state's, since nobody ever claimed the same about states (as if a baby chooses the state where they are to be born, rather than their parents). Nothing, of course, stops you from having the private opinion that the parents' actions are wrong.

The state has a duty to protect its citizens. A child is a citizen.

No state has a duty to protect those who never sought its protection.

Assuming neither the child nor his/her parents (not even one of them) wanted or even consented to be citizens of the state, the state acts just like any other mafia in appropriating and "protecting" what it deems to be its "citizens" against their will as well as against perceived "threats" which their victims never wished to be protected against. Who are they but a bunch of bandits?!

I also believe genital mutilation is wrong. However, male Circumcision is not considered mutilation by any other than a handful of ill informed activists.

P.S. I am off to mutilate my hands by clipping my nails.

Circumcision is on a par with docking a dogs tail, totally unnecessary and cruel abuse of a living being.

Dear Kipp,

<<Circumcision is on a par with docking a dogs tail, totally unnecessary and cruel abuse of a living being.>>

I happen to agree. Nevertheless I will fight tooth-and-nail till my last breath to allow Shadow-Minister, who believes otherwise, to do as he believes with his own children.

Shadow Minister <
I also believe genital mutilation is wrong. However, male Circumcision is not considered mutilation by any other than a handful of ill informed activists."

Really? Why then have most Doctors nowadays refused to do unnecessary circumcisions anymore?

I have watched and held down many baby boys years ago when it was fashionable to have baby boy's natural penis parts sliced off, and trust me, they sure looked like they felt every last cut.

Most of the time it seemed they were only being done because daddy wanted them to 'look like me'!
Trouble is, nowadays they would be very much in the minority lining up at the urinals minus their natural foreskin...

SOL,

Obviously years ago, no anaesthetic cream was used. It can be painful but doesn't have to be. Do you consider vaccinations an unnecessary infliction of pain.

Is removal of the appendix a mutilation?

The conditions vaccination strongly protects against are highly contagious and deadly to children - we forget, precisely because vaccination has made them so rare. The things circumcision debatably offers slight reductions of are nothing like that.

Two minutes? Shadow Minister, your practitioner was going dangerously fast.

1. Male and female genital cutting are much more comparable, especially ethically, than male genital cutting and vaccination. The intention exists inside the perpetrator's head (and the road to Hell is paved with good intentions) but "medical" circumcision was introduced for very similar anti-sexual reasons to FGC.

2. It is simply not true that circumcising later is worse than doing it earlier. On the contrary, any tiny mistake on a baby's penis is magnified when he grows up. A baby can afford to lose only 35ml of blood (two tablespoonsful) before he is in danger. An adult can monitor his own bleeding, infection and pain control. But above all, an adult can give his own informed consent. The main reason it is done to babies is that they can't fight back.

3. The individual's human right to bodily autonomy (which is where we came in) trump the insignificant and often bogus "benefits" and the real risk of harm, from disfigurement to sexual damage, all the way to death.

4. http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

HI, (Bodily autonomy is unaffected by circumcision. Perhaps you meant integrity)

if you had bothered to read my original post, you would see that the comparison with vaccinations is far closer than to female circumcision.

With vaccination, there are risks of reaction including fever and even death. The medical societies have evaluated this and based on the evidence reasoned that the benefits far outweigh the risks.

The evaluation has also been done on male circumcision, and the American medical body has decided that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Given that sexual function and sensitivity are completely unaffected by the procedure, (compared to female circumcision, which is the purpose) The proven health benefits outweight the miniscule risks that a proper procedure poses.

If you support vaccinations, your opposition to cicumcision is ethically challenged.

There is an historic connection to male circumcision.
In the couple of thousand BC years the middle east people somehow
knew that circumcised men had wives who had less cancers.
So it was advocated.

They also knew that those who ate pork had more illnesses and deaths
due to eating the pork.
So a ban was advocated.

About 1000BC the Chinese learnt how to raise pigs so there we no problems.
This information reached the west but by then it had become a
religious ban and still is.

So that is the connection, and it shows that ancient information is
often correct and can be accepted or avoided.

Dear Bazz,

"Occam's razor" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor) states that "other things being equal, a simpler explanation is better than a more complex one".

Why assert some ancient middle-easterners had sophisticated knowledge of cancer where a much clearer motive is known?

The Jews wanted to isolate themselves and prevent mixing with the gentiles. Having a clear, inescapable bodily identification-mark is one way, another is to have strict dietary rules which prevents a Jew from eating with gentiles. Not being able to eat together reduces the risk of intermarriage.

Y,

Occam's razor! How about in the heat of the middle east, circumcised men suffered from less infections, and this was incorporated into the religion, as was not eating pork (dangerous without refrigeration) and marriage.

Notably circumcision has been adopted by many other cultures independently, mostly in hot areas.

>>Why assert some ancient middle-easterners had sophisticated knowledge of cancer where a much clearer motive is known?

The Jews wanted to isolate themselves and prevent mixing with the gentiles. Having a clear, inescapable bodily identification-mark is one way, another is to have strict dietary rules which prevents a Jew from eating with gentiles. Not being able to eat together reduces the risk of intermarriage.<<

I agree with Shadow Minister: occam's razor suggests enforced circumcision and bans on food like pork and shellfish were just sound public health measures for people living in tents in a desert thousands of years ago. And not because it prevented cancer: it was the bacteria you had to watch out for back then. Most people probably didn't live long enough to worry about cancer.

We've come a long way since then and invented marvelous things like refrigeration and condoms and showers so we can eat pork and shellfish and leave children uncircumcised without doing ourselves or them any harm. It then becomes a question of personal taste as to whether or not we do these things.

Cheers,

Tony