IT may be a lot harder for the Jewish community to defeat the anti-bris movement than it might think.
San Francisco will vote on whether to ban circumcision. I would love to believe that the idea will be soundly defeated and just go away. I hope so.
However, this might be the beginning of a long road, and not just in San Francisco and not just in the US. Look at how the anti-kosher slaughter idea persists in Europe, long after the Nazis, who implemented this idea, have been defeated.
The reason I think the anti-bris movement may be hard to counter is because theres more behind it than anti-Semitism. If it were just a bunch of professed anti-Semites pushing this, it would be easier to defeat.
You might say, but there is freedom of religion in the US. It is guaranteed by the First Amendment. Circumcision is a religious rite. Its unconstitutional to ban it! You might be right. I hope so.
However, consider this: Certain religious practices are banned in the US. Most prominently, bigamy. This is (or was) a religious practice of Mormonism. A fundamental moral value monogamy has been universally understood in this country to supersede the religious rights of Mormons. If circumcision can be deligitimated and stigmatized as widely as bigamy, the religious rights argument for bris will fail.
This is why I think that Jews, Muslims (who also practice circumcision, though they do not require it on the eighth day of life) and others will need other arguments, too.
Some of these will be pro-arguments, and others will be against the anti-circumcision arguments of its promoters in San Francisco.
LET me start with the anti-circumcision arguments.
Religious freedom stops at another persons body, the anti-bris promoters say. Variations on the theme: A person must have the right to make his own decision on what is done to his own body. Therefore, ban circumcision until a person is 18, is an adult, and can decide for himself.
Reasonable as this argument might sound, it is contradicted by countless, underage, bodily interventions universally agreed upon.
No child is left to make his or her own decisions about innoculations or about medical problems that require surgery. No child is told to wait for a pressing heart surgery, for example, until he is 18 and can make up his own mind.
Nor is suspension of a childs bodily autonomy limited to medical necessity.
Cosmetic surgery is also not postponed until a child is 18.
Say a child is born with one of those terrible facial deformities that you see in the Smile advertisements. His or her early facial deformity may be fixed through surgical intervention. No one questions a parents right to do this. Bodies are not sacrosanct. It is universally agreed that a parent may intervene in the childs body for the childs own welfare before the child is 18. In fact, there are laws prohibiting parents from refusing to intervene to heal their childrens bodies.
Let the person himself decide sounds reasonable, but upon examination there is ample precedent and universal agreement that no child may have total say over his own body.
Another claim against circumcision is that it degrades intimate satisfaction. There is no way to measure this type of satisfaction, not to mention that it depends on more than the physical condition of ones body.
This is entirely a subjective matter.
Besides, a male who was circumcised as a child cannot compare how he feels to how he would feel without a bris. And even if he could compare, how one individual feels is entirely subjective, and may not be logically extrapolated to a class of people.
This anti-bris argument is subjectivist and non-verifiable.
ON what positive grounds can circumcision be advocated?
First, of course, religious freedom. The potential weakness outlined above notwithstanding, we would be unwise to assume that a first-time legal attempt to delegitimize circumcision will end up as successful as the long-time delegitimation of bigamy. The religious freedom argument should be stressed.
If the religious freedom to a bris at eight days old must be cancelled because a baby cant make up his own mind, is the US now going to deprive Catholic children of communion because the extra carbohydrates might contribute to obesity or diabetes in children predisposed to them and they need to make up their own mind on this?
Second, AIDS research indicates that the rate of transmission of the disease is lowered when a male population is circumcised.
Third, male circumcision is qualitatively different from female circumcision, which, in fact, is female mutilation and does eliminate female intimate satisfaction in a measurable way. Without going into detail, which would be inappropriate in this newspaper, let us just say by way of analogy, a person cannot be a right-handed baseball player if he does not have a right hand.
Also, the intent of bris is diametrically the opposite of the intent of female mutilation. The intent of bris is to remind a male that his intimate behavior is to be refined and considerate of his female spouse.
The intent is not the avoidance of intimacy, which is the intent of female mutilation.
Fourth, no one I know (Jew, Muslim or other) argues that circumcision should be imposed on the entire child population of San Francisco. It is the advocates of circumcision who respect autonomy. It is opponents of circumcision who do not; they would ban circumcision for every child in San Francisco.
Beyond all this, I believe there is traction in simply calling the attempt to ban circumcision outlandish, hateful and idiosyncratic.
Should the San Francisco ban actually pass, then the more substantive arguments outlined above will need to be focused on exclusively. However, when were dealing with a first-time attempt to ban circumcision, it deserves and, I hope, is vulnerable to the obvious: the ban is nasty, driven by negative energy, deserving of denunciation and condemnation.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
