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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36196 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Let's talk about infant male circumcision. Common in the United States, considered beastly in most European countries. But they don't spend much time criticizing the United States about it, perhaps due to fear of being called anti-semitic.

Reasons not to do it:

The foreskin has functions

Bad for the infant's brain due to inadequate aenesthesia

Complications ranging from meatal stenosis to more grisly and life-changing outcomes

Etc etc

Anyway, besides just introducing a topic I believe is underdiscussed both on the Motte and in general, my questions are this:

How do you rate the importance of this issue relative to commonly discussed culture war stuff? If it is true that circumcision is a serious violation akin to rape, then it seems very very important.

and

Does anyone on this board support routine infant circumcision, or is this thread just going to be full of a lot of devil's advocate stuff?

deleted

I am only begrudgingly tolerant of it for religious reasons for freedom-of-religion purposes

For an adult, yes. If you are full-grown and compos mentis and you positively insist on having bits of you chopped off, well, it's your body and your life. But I don't think you have the religious freedom to do it to someone else, especially if that someone else is a helpless child.

I don't think it's an urgent issue. Comparisons with rape and the worse forms of FGM are excessive. But I do think it's wrong.

I believe it is urgent, and I don't believe these comparisons are excessive. It seems to me that if the procedure were invented today, those precise comparisons would stop it dead in its tracks. A portion of society has been mutilating children for millennia for nonsense reasons, and all of the modern reasoning around cleanliness and STDs are epicycles tacked on well after the fact.

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