Another one for the "conventional wisdom" B.S. list: Circumcision

[MediumTex]

Wow. This thread should have come with a PG-13 rating.

I love the text ads at the top of the page.

[Storm]

I find it interesting that although I might make the perfectly sensible choice to keep my son intact and let him decide if he wants to keep or lose his foreskin, the societal costs of millions of baby sons keeping their foreskins might be significant in that there will be a higher occurrence of STDs.

I would argue, however, that the best way to prevent STDs is by practicing safe sex, rather than counting on a circumcision to reduce your chances...  With that in mind, I think if I were given the choice between feeling more sexual pleasure in a safe manner, or having unprotected sex while circumcised, I would choose the former every time.  Seriously, circumcision kills millions of nerve endings.  Do you honestly think that sex feels the same without the foreskin?

Again, this is a simply barbaric practice that is seemingly medically justified due to societal norms.  There are a lot of other things we can do to lower the rate of STDs, such as forced sterilization, but you don't hear many people advocating for that...

[stone]

From a UK perspective, I think it is good to have lots of information out their to help parents decide but I think it would be nuts if there was a major effort by people against male circumcision whilst at the same time allowing so much female circumcision in the UK and of UK girls sent abroad for the procedure. Although illegal, nothing is done to stop it. Girls are even sent from all over europe to the UK to undergo dangerous and barbaric female genital mutilation.

WTF?  I thought that crap was only in the backwaters of Africa.  Oh joy...

It's widely practiced by UK citizens of African origin:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00jklm6
Female Genital Mutilation
FGM is illegal in the UK, but despite legislation nobody has been prosecuted. Jenni discusses the issues with Detective Sergeant Vicky Washington & Jane Ellison, Conservative MP for Battersea.

[stone]

How often do you go to anti-circumcision sites?

Reub, you are the total master of  the one line! I don't know whether it is just me but what you write so often brings me up short and sends me into a whirl of re-examination of everything I was thinking.

[Reub]

"Reub, you are the total master of  the one line! I don't know whether it is just me but what you write so often brings me up short and sends me into a whirl of re-examination of everything I was thinking."

Stone, funny, but that is almost the same exact effect that a circumcision can have!

[WildAboutHarry]

To lighten things up a bit, let's not forget the old Saturday Night Live skit where a circumcision is performed in the back of a moving Lincoln Town Car to demonstrate how smooth the ride is

[WildAboutHarry]

Actually, it was the (fictitious) 1978 Royal Deluxe II.

Right you are.  It was called the Royal Deluxe II, but it was definitely a Ford Motor Company product, some kind of gigantic Lincoln or Mercury model perhaps.

"Perfect"

[MachineGhost]

How often do you go to anti-circumcision sites?

LOL!  Not often, but the topic certainly sparked a curiosity.   Impartial is not a word I would use.

[Storm]

It seems the orthodox rabbis who still practice the barbaric act of sucking the blood out of the penis with their mouth, which caused 2 infant deaths due to contraction of herpes simplex virus, are refusing to abide by a law, which if passed, would require them to first notify the parents that there is a risk of transmission of herpes simplex virus, and get a consent form signed.

http://abcnews.go.com/health/t/blogEntry?id=17143392

Not only does it seem like a truly barbaric ritual with some deep homo erotic overtones, it would seem that they would want to inform the parents of what the ritual entailed, so there would be no surprises.  Most rabbis use a sterile pipette to suction the blood after circumcision - this is only a handful of orthodox nutcases that insist on doing it with their mouth.  And, it turns out, many parents were not aware that the rabbi would be putting his mouth on the infants penis and sucking the blood out, and were horrified not only when that happened, but also later as their infant spent time in the ICU due to brain hemmorhaging from herpes simplex.  This is truly disgusting.

I have nothing against the Jewish religion.  Quite a few of my friends are observant Jews who observe the sabbath, however, just as with fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims, orthodox Jews make the rest of the religion look bad.

[l82start]

Orthodox Jews are entitled to their beliefs and practices, within the confines of secular law, just as are all religions. To smear the whole group is just wrong.

So far this month various people on this site have smeared Orthodox Jews, Mormons, and Scientologists. Have we reached our quota yet?

Would the Bogleheads allow this?

NO they wouldn't.... and in many cases that is their loss..  not that reading smears is a gain, but that we have a great group of intelligent posters who calmly make what are often wise counter arguments to controversial and narrow views that lead to great discussions..   i say three cheers for freedom of speech and the gentle touch used by the mods to keep it civil and allow open discussions at the same time..

[Storm]

Good points, tennpaga.  Perhaps the idea that some people find this homo erotic is a little too far for most to consider.  For that, I apologize.  However, I do believe that a consent form is the least of the intrusions that government could push into their lives.

[dualstow]

And THAT said, can you imagine the outcry if a Muslim in the U.S. said something like this:

"When it comes to the law, we are all there - it's our obligation, according to our religion. But not when the law goes against our religion," [Rabbi Niederman] said.

The resulting catfight among Republican nutcases to see who could be the first to go on Fox News and propose a constitutional amendment would be entertaining, at least.

I get that. I understand that there are people who put their religion or customs above the law. And I would probably look the other way if someone took a little peyote in the desert and had a "spiritual" experience in the desert without hurting anyone. But I'm one of those fools who thinks some laws are designed to protect people- the babies in this case. Any mohels who want to live in this country and defy this law should be locked up. That's not because they're a "shonda for the goyim", but because they're harming children, plain and simple.

[stone]

As I see it, male circumcision is a relatively minor physical alteration that has deep cultural/religious importance to some people. What people feed their kids or whether they encourage them to exercise etc are also things that permanently change them physically.  If people never read books or screens then they are much much less likely to become short sighted. I guess many of us have been permanently disabled because our parents encouraged us to read as kids making us short sighted in the process. Anyway I think the most profound way that parents permanently change their children is through what they say to them. The change may not be physical but it is often more significant. I think it is a very very big step to say that parents shouldn't be in charge of their children. IMO only in truly extreme cases should other people intervene. There is a terrible precedent to all of this. ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations

The Bringing Them Home report also identified instances of official misrepresentation and deception, such as when caring and able parents were incorrectly described by Aboriginal Protection Officers as not being able to properly provide for their children, or when parents were told by government officials that their children had died, even though this was not the case. One first hand account referring to events in 1935 stated:

    I was at the post office with my Mum and Auntie [and cousin]. They put us in the police ute and said they were taking us to Broome. They put the mums in there as well. But when we'd gone [about ten miles (16 km)] they stopped, and threw the mothers out of the car. We jumped on our mothers' backs, crying, trying not to be left behind. But the policemen pulled us off and threw us back in the car. They pushed the mothers away and drove off, while our mothers were chasing the car, running and crying after us. We were screaming in the back of that car. When we got to Broome they put me and my cousin in the Broome lock-up. We were only ten years old. We were in the lock-up for two days waiting for the boat to Perth.[37]

The report discovered that removed children were, in most cases, placed into institutional facilities operated by religious or charitable organisations, although a significant number, particularly females, were "fostered" out. Children taken to such places were frequently punished if caught speaking local indigenous languages, and the intention was specifically to prevent them being socialised in Aboriginal cultures, and raise the boys as agricultural labourers and the girls as domestic servants.

[dualstow]

religious freedom vs individual rights?

i support both...  it raises the question which is the priority? the right to practice circumcision (permanent alterations) to a child to young to make the decision? or the child's right to not have his body permanently altered w/o consent?

or does being a child void there rights in some way? if you tried to force this practice on a non-consenting adults you would certainly get a big fight

i tend to be rather unconcerned about it probably because the practice is such a cultural norm and it seems minor, but this thread has me wondering

Well, as WildAboutHarry said on page 2,

Children are not property, but parents have the right and obligation to direct their children's lives, and that includes all manner of medical decisions.

If we don't uphold this, we're one day going to have vegans arguing that toddlers have a right not be fed Jello until they understand what it's made of.

There are deaf parents who choose not to give their deaf child a cochlear implant -- and as counter-intuitive as it may sound, some of them have reasonable arguments. The controversial thing about circumcision is that it cannot be undone.

Then again, the most recent link in this thread is not about taking away a parent's right to have their son circumcised. It's about ensuring parental consent for a specific practice that is sometimes a part of  circumcision, i.e. the mouth on the willy.

[Pointedstick]

Curiously this topic has come up on another site i visit at the same time as this one, and based on the responses and comments on the topic it seems like the Europeans and a few of the Americans participating are in the ban circumcision outright camp, both the medical and religious ones. They say that the parents have no right to have one preformed before the child is age of consent..
I agree with getting/needing parental consent for the "M on W practice" mentioned in the link, but i have a hard time seeing the procedure as the atrocious mutilation the anti circumcision pro government ban people see it as being..

personally i think let the medical procedure die out naturally as society becomes aware that it is mostly pointless, and let the religious do there thing since there is "no real harm done" and keep the mouths of the sick and ill away from the open cuts (YUCK)

interactive-processing, I think what you wrote there bears repeating. In general, think it's usually a better idea to let a practice you consider to be barbaric die out naturally rather than push for the government to ban it. That just entrenches and emboldens the opposition.

[MachineGhost]

i.e. the mouth on the willy.

  Why does weird homo eroticism always seem to be in the upper echelons of occult religions?  Is it some kind of shaming tactic to prevent inner sanctum secrets from being revealed?

[Lone Wolf]

Harry Browne certainly was right when he pointed out that "Government Doesn't Work".  It's hilarious to see (as usual) what an absolute mess government makes of incredibly simple issues.  The obvious solution for this circumcision "issue" is for government to just butt out of the question entirely.

Notice how adept government is at turning people into mortal enemies over issues that ought to be of no consequence!

The case of the German ban on circumcision is government stupidity at its finest.  I mean Germany, of all places.  In a crowd as learned as you folks, I won't bother pointing out why some of the awfulness in Germany's recent history makes this court decision particularly tone deaf.

Either way, 800 years later, the Victorians were in agreement, convinced, in a world before Portnoy’s Complaint, that circumcision prevented boys from masturbating.

I'd heard this idea that the procedure originated in order to make young men less likely to spend time "bashing the bishop", so to speak.  Turns out, though, that circumcised men are about 76% more likely to regularly spend time "jerkin the gherkin" than uncircumcised men.  If the Victorians thought that this would decrease the likelihood that a young man would "flog the log", they were sadly mistaken.

Frankly, I doubt any of this matters very much at all.  As pointed out before, the American Academy of Pediatrics has found that circumcision is a pretty good idea but I seriously doubt that skipping it has any substantial downside, either.  This won't stop governments around the world from trying to do something stupid one way or the other, of course. 

[MachineGhost]

The second approach uses sheets of skin developed from cells in the lab that originally came from foreskin after circumcisions.

"That's in clinical trials now and they're having tremendous results," Irgens said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/1 ... 70376.html

[MachineGhost]

One of the preventive measures discussed in the book, male circumcision, has become an unexpected source of controversy. Anti-circumcision activists have hijacked Amazon.com’s “peer review”? comments section, which allows readers to vote on which book reviews are helpful. This system has morphed into a vicious game of character assassination by conspiracy theorists who reject decades’ worth of scientific evidence, showing how easy it is for a concerted crusade to squelch good science.

http://tinyurl.com/cedolf2

[MachineGhost]

The State Department no longer wants you to tell the passport examiner about the circumstances of your circumcision, but does still want to know the dates and locations of all of your mother’s pre- and post-natal medical appointments, how long she was hospitalized for your birth, and a complete list of everyone who was in the room when you were born. The revised forms no longer ask for all the addresses at which you have lived, but only for those addresses you are least likely to know: all the places you lived from birth until age 18.

http://tinyurl.com/d6lum54