Stop male genital mutilation

Oh, those moonbatty San Franciscans! They’re trying to get the banning of circumcision in San Franciso on the city ballot.

Horrors! Slicing off an infant’s foreskin is a God-given right!

Except that it isn’t.

It is what it is: male genital mutilation.

There is consensus that female genital mutilation, even for — perhaps especially for — religious reasons should be banned throughout the United States of America, but male genital mutilation widely is considered normal. (I guess that in essence we tell our male newborns: “Man up, you fucking baby!”)

So it (genital mutilation) seems to be a line-drawing game. Involuntarily slicing off a female’s clitoris (and perhaps other portions of the external female genitalia along with it): Bad. Clearly. Duh! Involuntarily slicing off a male’s foreskin: That’s perfectly OK, you moron!

“Opponents say the [San Francisco anti-circumcision] ballot measure would never stand up in court because it violates the freedom of religion clause of the U.S. Constitution,” notes SFGate.com.

Yet parents may not withhold certain medical treatments from their children because of religious beliefs, courts have ruled; the state’s interest in protecting the safety and well-being of the children within the state trumps the parents’ religious beliefs in these cases, the courts have ruled.

So again, this is a matter of degree.

To believe that non-medically necessary circumcision is OK is to say that a little genital mutilation is OK. Just not a lot of genital mutilation. (Non-medically) castrating an infant due to the parents’ religious beliefs, for instance, obviously would be illegal and immoral.

Non-medically necessary circumcision is, at the very least, child cruelty.

There will come a day, if we human beings have not destroyed our species by then, that future generations will regard the dead practice of circumcision as what it is (well, was): a cruel, barbaric, unnecessary practice based on religious custom (that is, based upon ignorance/superstitution).

There is no God. Therefore, there is no God who gives a shit as to whether or not a male still has his foreskin or not.

Most parents who still circumcise their infant sons, I believe, do so primarily because it’s just custom. I don’t believe that it’s a deeply religious thing for them. It’s just what you do: snip it off. (That reminds me of the joke that I tell when eating rings of calamari with friends at a restaurant: that calamari is what they do with the discarded foreskins. And that if they fried them, they could make something a lot like pork rinds…)

My fraternal twin some time ago asked our mother why she had us circumcised. My mother, who never has been religious — never took us to church, never talks about God or Jesus or any other of that hocus-pocus bullshit — answered him that that’s just what parents did.

You just did it; you didn’t think about it.

But we need to take an actual look at what we actually are doing: We are taking a knife to an infant and slicing off a portion of the infant that in the vast majority of cases we don’t need to slice off.

And this has to cause the infant pain. We probably don’t need our earlobes, but few would argue that it’s OK to lop off an infant’s earlobes. (Indeed, what if a parent’s religious beliefs mandated that the infant’s earlobes be chopped off? Would the religious beliefs trump the earlobes?)

Homo sapiens wouldn’t have come this far (I do believe that we are at around 7 billion human beings on the planet) if evolution had fucked up the reproductive function, for fuck’s sake. The foreskin is not the problem that so many claim that it is.

For any actual foreskin-related pediatric medical problems, such as chronic phimosis that does not respond to other treatments, if involuntary circumcision truly is medically necessary, then fine, do it. But to perform the procedure routinely on male infants is child cruelty.

And if it’s a religious thing, why not let the male decide for himself when he turns 18? I realize that the Old Testament prescribes eight days for circumcision, but if one believes in a God that truly gives a shit about foreskin status, wouldn’t God’s attitude on the matter be better late than never? At least an average 18-year-old could decide for himself.

I never got the choice, and neither have millions of other victims of male genital mutilation.

The practice of routine circumcision is backasswards and needs to go. No one has the constitutional right to mutilate, in the name of religion, the genitalia of his or her child — even ” just a little.”

P.S. Take a look at these pictures of a circumcision procedure and tell me that this is not genital mutilation. The author of the website predictably claims HIV/AIDS prevention as a justification for circumcision, but that is FUCKING BULLSHIT.

The real “reason” for the vast majority of circumcisions is: “That’s the way we’ve always done it!” Mindless circumcision mindlessly was performed long before HIV/AIDS ever came on the scene, so HIV/AIDS prevention is a bullshit defense of the child cruelty that is non-medically necessary circumcision.