Circumcision and Abortion

One of the strangest groups of people I have come across is the anti-circumcision lobby.  Basically their position is that circumcision should be banned until a person is legally an adult.  Now don’t get me wrong here.  I am not saying their position is good or bad.  All I do is ask them for their justifications for something as drastic as banning a practice that has been performed for thousands of years.

It generally breaks along two lines.  Some defenders of the position use the argument that religious belief is not a justification for harming someone else.  The other group attempts to argue that it’s the fact that the child didn’t consent as justification for the ban.

Nobody is going to deny that religious rights granted by the constitution are limited to not using them to cause harm to someone else.  However, this first camp fails because what they define as harm so it can be used to justify denying religious rights is not the political reality of the situation.  Society as a whole sets what defines harm when it enacts laws.  Given that circumcision is legal in most countries, these societies have spoken and said it’s not harm, so therefore stopping it is a violation of constitutionally guaranteed religious rights.

The second camp introduces a really odd idea.  They are claiming that the child didn’t give consent.  True, but then again you can only ever give consent if you have that right in the first place.  Even they agree that children don’t have the right to consent.  It’s normally based on the usual mental capability argument you would expect.  However it has this strange effect of turning a right to consent after reaching adulthood into some kind of object that the parents are holding for the child until they become of age.

Both camps try to argue that children are not slaves so harming them or doing something without their consent, especially if it’s a permanent change to their body, is some offence against some unwritten code of conduct. This code of conduct appears more restrictive than existing law as it would ban circumcision.

But what they fail to understand is that slaves you can sell.  Since you cannot sell your kids it would seem quite obvious that children are not slaves.  Forcing someone to do something that they don’t consent to do is not making them slaves.  So obviously, their reason for making this argument is that are looking for sympathy for their position.  They want to paint the children as the oppressed peoples and the parents out to be the evil slave owners.

The “it’s really harm” argument can be answered with a simple question, “Has a law been passed that bans circumcision?”  If not the answer is no.  These people are arguing that when and if they get a law passed they will be right.  They are just forgetting that until that law passes they are just factually wrong.  It’s not harm.  Declaring it as harm is exactly the same thing as declaring abortion harm and calling for it to be banned.

This is actually quite odd that the anti-abortion fans and anti-circumcision fans are trying to use the same “protect the children from their evil parents” argument. Normally these two groups are diametrically opposed on most issues.  At least it’s good the anti-circumcision crowd is learning from how the anti-abortion crowd did their thing.

Considering that most people who are anti-circumcision are also pro-abortion this is REALLY odd.  You would think pro-abortion fans would want to remove restrictions on the rights of the parents.  However in this case they want to place restrictions on what a parent can do.

When you question them on this oddity, they of course claim that abortion is much different from circumcision.  This of course can only be described as completely obvious to anyone that thinks about the subject.  So abortion is killing a small cluster of cells and circumcision is removing some arguably excess skin.  That doesn’t sound to me like a whole lot of difference.

But the question of the parent having the right to chose to have the procedure or not have the procedure is exactly the same.  The question is whether or not it makes sense for the parent to have the right to make the decision.

And this is where the real motivations begin to show up.  Banning an abortion is basically an idea that is pushed by religious groups on the grounds of some kind of sanctity of life basis.  Of course the anti-religious types push the other direction and want the parents to have rights that override the religious concerns of the opposing group.

But when it comes to circumcision, the roles get reversed.  In this case circumcision is traditionally a religious practice so the religious groups are pushing to keep it legal while the anti-religious groups are the ones that want to ban it.  I find this VERY telling of what is really going on here.  The anti-religion groups appear to be trying to punish the religious groups by banning practices that are central to their faiths.  Just the same as the religious groups are trying to ban practices they consider immoral.

As has been shown many times in history, pushing something based on a like or a dislike of some religious idea doesn’t really work.  Whether you are trying to force some moral position on the population or you are trying to ban some religious practice, the attempt to do so only causes the opposing camp to harden their position and fight back even more.

In addition, the escalation of the positions will lead each side to take more and more irrational positions.  In the case of abortion, you get people pushing to ban medical procedures based on when a child is declared born.  For example, consider the partial birth abortion issue.

In this case, the procedure simply moves the unborn child out of the uterus before terminating it, instead of killing it before it leaves the uterus.  This has medical advantages because it places less risk on the mother.  However, by trying to define birth as when the child leaves the uterus, there is an obvious attempt to get the child protected with the rights of an officially “born” person earlier to restrict the number of abortions that are performed.

However, look at what a law like this actually does.  It takes away the mother’s right to the safer medical procedure.  It delegates the mother to being a second class citizen.  It raises the unborn child with little if any rights under the law to a first class citizen and declares that its OK for the mother to have to suffer more or even die to keep the child alive.  Picking one person as more important than another is a hallmark of any wacked out line of thinking regardless of if religion is a factor or not.

Another example the extremes people will go to is the recently defeated “Personhood Amendment”.  This was an attempt to define unborn children as having the exact same rights as people that have been born.  Of course, this was nothing more than an attempt to ban abortions by giving the rights to these unborn children so that abortions could be classified as murder.  And as the defeat shows, not what the general public considers acceptable.

People pushing this kind of position are simply insane and they are trying to redefine two separate groups as being the same so that they can push their political agenda.  While they focus on their proposed redefinition giving rights to some group of people, they ignore how they are taking away rights from other people.

And just the same the anti-circumcision fans are doing the same thing.  By trying to pretend that children have the same rights to make decisions that adults do, they are seeking to remove rights from those parents.  It makes no difference that they even concede that the children don’t have the rights and shouldn’t have adult rights.  The fact that their kooky ideas will not change the children’s right to choose anything, and actually will not given them any more freedoms, they still want to pursue a position that would reduce the rights of a parent to decide what is best for their children.

To outdo the anti-abortion fascists, the anti-circumcision fascists came up with one better.  In an attempt to get a circumcision banned on a limited basis, they convinced a group of stupid people to propose a referendum to ban circumcision in the city of San Francisco.  By limiting the geographic reach of law and limiting the number of people that had a say in making the law they where hoping to get the law passed.

However, as in typical wacked out extremist style, they didn’t bother to study the history of why laws allowing circumcision where in place nor did they bother to check on the state laws.  Before the referendum even got on the ballot, a judge struck the proposal because if violated state laws that said only the state could regulate medical procedures.

To make matters worse, news coverage of the issue lead a couple of politicians to propose a new state laws that made it illegal for a municipality to attempt to ban circumcision.  The ballot initiative was proposed in February 2011 and the new law passed in the October 2011, so in less than a year, the anti-circumcision lobby was successful in getting their own well crafted political tactics outlawed by the state.

As with the personhood amendment, the banning of circumcision really only showed that the people pushing these positions are really outside the mainstream of political thought.  When you bring the defeats up with these supporters, you generally get some looser comment, like “It’s not really a loss.  We raised awareness of the issue.”

In reality the only awareness they raised is for more people to understand how insane those political positions actually are.  Now tell me, do you think a personhood amendment or a ban on circumcision are more or less likely after major defeats of both camps in the same year?

Their response to that is generally “Well changing laws is a long hard process.  Look at how long it took to get abortion rights or gay rights.”  But of course, those issues where ones of what rights adults actually have not ones of what rights children, born or not, actually have.  While abortion rights or gay rights as adult rights do seem to make sense, a circumcision ban based on the child’s rights seems dubious at best.

So for me it seems very inconsistent to not be either anti-abortion and anti-circumcision at the same time or pro-abortion and pro-circumcision at the same time.  Either you believe parental rights should be restricted based on some religious or non-religious justification or you believe parental rights should be maintained based or some religious or non-religious justification.

Trying to split the difference and take different pro/anti positions at the same time on the two issues seems to cause one position to undermine the validity of the other position.

But then again, I am an evil non-confirming amoral atheist that thinks the first thing to do is make sure all adults have equal rights to practice their religious beliefs as long as they don’t hurt someone else.  Then I am free to not practice those religions and those religions won’t hurt me.

But as all politics goes.  Given I’m 50 years old, I not going to be having kids in the future, and have been already circumscribed, I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass what abortion or circumcision laws you put in place.  Neither would affect me in any way.  For that matter if you want to pass a law where children under the age of 18 must be kept on leashes in public, that’s fine with me too J  Once again, it doesn’t affect me.

Maybe someone should ask: How many anti-abortion fans where planning to have an abortion or how many anti-circumcision fans where planning that for their kids?  Seems like both groups are power hungry douche bags that want to force others to do what they want without affecting themselves.