Circumcision - yes or no?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The marginal damage to religious freedom would be so much worse than the direct damage to 'bodily integrity' that even though it unnerves me I have to go with the first option. Even from a grey legalistic standpoint we give parents pretty a pretty broad umbra of authority over medical decisions for minors anyway.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's hilarious how ~important~ people are making out having foreskin to be.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's hilarious how ~important~ people are making out having foreskin to be.

It's more the principle of bodily integrity - one that (personally) I value much more than some notion of religious freedom, which, in my book, shouldn't extend to permanent body modification of a person who's not able to consent to it. To use a deliberately exaggerated example, if my parents chopped off my hand as a baby because they were members of an obscure sect that demanded such, I'd be outraged, and I wouldn't much care about their protestations of "religious freedom" - unethical is unethical is unethical.

By the way, to address another valid point raised here, as someone who's used the word "mutilation" to describe male circumcision, I do understand the negative reactions to it, since it's implying parallels between male circumcision and female "circumcision", which, for the record, I certainly don't place on a remotely comparable moral level.

I do think the non-essential, permanent removal of a body part for cultural reasons is mutilation, however (relatively) benign it supposedly is - it's not entirely benign - there's evidence that circumcision can reduce sexual pleasure, for example. But I'd like to be clear that I'm not comparing it to much more horrific practices.

PS: In response to Morgan's above point, since I've posted in another thread on this I'd also stress that I'm not some kind of anti-circumcision activist, and the only times the topic's occurred to me at all is because of this forum.

And, the most important part of this post :

...IMO.

All right. That's fair. I obviously disagree with you on the relative values at play here, but I can understand where you're coming from.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's hilarious how ~important~ people are making out having foreskin to be.

Well, obviously we'll never know, will we?

I could, but I still probably won't.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Jesus Christ, people... you're talking about circumcision like it was something worse than AIDS and Hitler combined. Having or lacking a damn foreskin, what real difference does it make? Seriously. You're talking about piece of skin like it was some freaking essence of humanity.

masculinity.

Corrected that for you.

Everybody with any sort of clue says "if you must circumcize, do it on infants. It's awfully painful on older boys."

And this I think is the crux of the thing. Having it done in infancy is, relatively speaking, a mercy.