Talking Jewish Circumcision (Especially When You Aren’t Jewish)

By Rebecca Wald © 2014
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Routine Infant Circumcision vs. Religious Circumcision



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  1. Who cares that the religious take offense?

    We have begun to enter the age of rationalism; that is, as justification for destructive surgery on a healthy child's sexual organ, appeasing the Creator of the Universe via the sacrificial offering of a hunk of flesh will be progressively seen as even nuttier than merely keeping healthy—let alone trying to match the scars of Father and Son.

    Germany, of all places, has already sentenced to death the ritualized cutting of a youth's genitalia.

    The much debated ruling out of Cologne has informed the European public that it's not only possible, but indeed acceptable to hold—and even express—a hostile opinion on this matter; and, while their perennially outmoded politicians kowtow to the dying philosophy of moral relativism and to the cultural dust of an increasingly distant war from some century past, the inexorable opinion of the public is that such patent child abuse be abolished as yet another sordid stain from mankind's endless history of deplorable barbarisms.

    Ha! Let them gnash their teeth in frustrated indignation; it is the only way that these damaged minds can ever feel the flames of their self-wrought shame.

  2. There is a problem that you don't address here : when you're having an open debate about RIC, it is not rare that a person belonging to a religious group where circumcision is tradition jumps in and pushes religion as the center matter. They might say something as "Since our religion does that, opposing it is religious discrimination in disguise". It's been clearly the case with the recent european debate about circumcision, where religious leaders have successfully shunned the health and human rights aspects to make it all about religious rights.
    I understand when you say that religious circumcision is best discussed by people close to that religion. But it is a real problem when any religious person can turn a debate about RIC into a debate about their pesonal religious customs. It is a cheap tactics to make most opponents of human rights abuses in the difficult spot that you describe.
    It is a point that I wish you would have addressed here.


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