re: #16 Obdicut

Heh. Ban ballet, I mean, though ‘do you want to bad ballet’ sounds funky-awesome.

Rather than play rhetorical slap-fight, lemme just lay out the normal argument here.

1. Male circumcision and FGM are almost entirely unrelated, and those conflating them are doing an enormous disservice to women affected by FGM.

2. Male circumcision is medically recommended by WHO since uncircumcised men are at a greater risk for transmission of HIV.

3. Other than that, the medical literature in general has a very slight lean to circumcision being more beneficial than harmful.

4. We have our kids do many, many, many, many more harmful and dangerous things, unnecessary things, like football and ballet, things that have the chance to kill and permanently injure them.

4a. The immediate rebuttal to this is that kids have a choice if they want to do that, and for those who claim that, I invite them to re-examine childhood. Most kids wind up doing a lot of stuff they don’t really want to do because their parents want them to; moreover, it’s impossible for a seven year old girl to really evaluate the damage that ballet is going to do to her body.

5. A hell of a lot of the time, you’re going to find virulent anti-Semites as some of the loudest voices against circumcision. This became real clear in California with the ridiculously racist white supremacist Foreskin Man comics, but it’s unfortunately common.

What you said.

The fact that it’s a religious practice, however, as another poster put it, should be completely irrelevant to its evaluation.