San Francisco: Circumcision Ban and Religious Freedom - TIME
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Jacques Amiel, center, holds newborn Benjamin Abecassis after the baby's bris — a Jewish circumcision ritual — in San Francisco on May 15, 2011In the 1960s and '70s, the San Francisco Bay Area was where the counterculture really started — the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury, gay rights in the Castro. Today, the Bay Area is challenging the larger culture in a new and controversial way: there will be a referendum on the ballot in November that would make it the first major city in the U.S. to outlaw circumcision.
The San Francisco debate over circumcision initially centered on the value of the procedure itself — opponents call it barbaric, supporters point to its long tradition and say it prevents disease. But increasingly the debate is becoming one about religion, in which critics accuse backers of the referendum of bigotry and insist a ban would violate the First Amendment's religious freedoms. (Read more about the move to ban circumcision in San Francisco.)
There is plenty of reason to oppose the ban on its own merits. There is no need for a law: if people do not believe in circumcision, they should not have it done to themselves or their children. And even if there were to be a circumcision ban, this [...]
Personally I think circumcision is unnecessary and Dude and I tend to take a 'his body, his choice' approach with little Dude. If he wants it done later he can have it done; it didn't seem an appropriate choice for us to make, not bein' religious folks and hoping as we do that by the time he's at risk to be sexually exposed to HIV/AIDS he'll also be capable of choosing whether or not to keep his foreskin. (There are folks who can tell you more about the controversiality of the WHO study; I'm not one of them so for the purposes of this writing I'll assume it's findings are accurate.) Any other health concerns are generally related to poor hygiene and sanitation, problems that shouldn't be prevalent - but in some areas certainly are - in a wealthy, industrialized country, and that haven't been an issue. So we're clear where Dude and I stand on circumcision.
I still can't get behind a ban. Remember back-alley abortion? Have you seen the list of casualties in the war on drugs? Now it's circumcision, the thing we're going to force underground and leave to the criminals, putting at risk not adult women, or addicts, DEA, civilians, and cartel members, but infant boys. (I mean, that's if you take the view that the only ones at risk in an unsafe abortion scenario is the woman; those most against abortion seem to ignore the risks to the baby they're so desperate to save of being subjected to a failed abortive procedure, and most everyone ignores any impact on the father.)
I'll say it again. Every time we raise a cry for some thing or activity or choice to be illegal, especially when we do so on supposed moral grounds, we create an environment in which it is more than likely that our own choices will be the next on the chopping block, and, we are living in a state of insanity when we believe that majority rules can effectively be applied to individual choices in societies larger than, say, three. A majority can choose a leadership and a leadership can be given the choice to determine individual choices, but that does not mean that the choices of all or even most individuals will fit within the choices approved by that leadership.
Our founding fathers tried to install a system wherein the leadership was in place to guide, and to steer, but responsibility for the individual and his or her choices lay with the individual. That's a sensible system. We haven't wanted to stick with it and have found lots of ways to subvert and undermine it, but as technology moves us inexorably toward transparency, which will lead to honesty (with ourselves and one another) and self-responsibility, I think we'll find our way back to it. That'll be cool. :)
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