Circumcision violates human rights?
» Heterogeneous
Oh boo hoo!
Circumcision is superfluous surgery but not a violation of 'human rights.'
As two millennia of Jewish survival and the erotic writings of circumcised persons clearly demonstrate infant loss of foreskin doesn't interfere with sexual functioning or pleasure.
But it does give people who need to make more substantive changes in their own life a place to put the blame other than themselves.
Every day for the past six months, John has been wearing two 6oz metal ball-bearings attached by straps to the end of his penis. He's not a fetishist; he's on a course of DIY plastic surgery to correctwhat was, in his view, a terrible wrong inflicted on him when he was a baby. John was circumcised and he wants his foreskin back.
See also Circumcision as a crime.
Comments
Surely the point is not the circumcision but the consent? Whether or not the process does or does not impair sexual function, doesn’t a person have a right to decide whether a part of his or her body is going to be removed, when there is no medical reason whatsoever for the process? Sorry, but mutilating little boys because it says in some old book that “God told you” would not ordinarily save the perpetrator from jail—except in this case. And similarly mutilating little girls is illegal in most Western jurisdictions, if not all. Double standard.
The continued success of the Jewish religion has to do with the many qualities of that religion, and that success is not dependent on their being permitted to continue to mutilate children with the consent of lily-livered governments.
There is no question that infant mutilation is an abuse of the child’s human rights, and parents’ religious persuasions do not override the rights of the individual child. If the child needs to be circumcised to fully enter into a religion, then that decision should be taken at majority and never before. Religion has to adapt to what wider society thinks is acceptable. R
Posted by: ruairidh | October 1, 2005 9:59 AM