{"id":857,"date":"2013-11-28T23:16:41","date_gmt":"2013-11-28T23:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/?p=857"},"modified":"2013-11-28T23:18:07","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T23:18:07","slug":"stand-up-for-your-son-say-no-to-ritual-circumcision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/human-rights\/stand-up-for-your-son-say-no-to-ritual-circumcision\/","title":{"rendered":"Stand up for your son: Say ‘no’ to ritual circumcision"},"content":{"rendered":"
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http:\/\/972mag.com\/stand-up-for-your-son-say-no-to-ritual-circumcision\/49669\/<\/a><\/div>\n
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By Larry Derfner<\/h3>\n

|Published June 29, 2012<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Stand up for your son: Say ‘no’ to ritual circumcision<\/h1>\n

Even if criminalization is impractical, this week\u2019s\u00a0German court ruling against circumcision\u00a0on children, except for medical purposes,\u00a0sent a much-needed message.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/h1>\n
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I\u2019ve been an atheist since adolescence, but being a Jew has always been a vital element of my identity, something I can\u2019t\u00a0imagine not being, and for this reason, above all others, I knew as a matter of course that I would have my two sons circumcized. It was only after going through it, with the blood and the boys\u2019 wailing\u00a0and our\u00a0anguish and worry –\u00a0with the realization that this\u00a0mohel<\/em>\u00a0was actually taking a knife to the foreskins of our\u00a0eight-day-old sons\u2019 penises\u00a0– that I began to\u00a0think about it.<\/p>\n

And what I arrived at\u00a0was this \u2013 I am\u00a0somewhat\u00a0ashamed that I was willing to put my infant boys at risk, that I was willing to put them through such severe pain, for fear that if I didn\u2019t, it would mean they weren\u2019t Jewish and it would be my responsibility.<\/p>\n

How ridiculous.\u00a0I never\u00a0believed<\/em>\u00a0in\u00a0ritual circumcision, if I\u2019d ever thought about it I\u2019d have said it was\u00a0barbaric,\u00a0risky and\u00a0fairly insane to inflict\u00a0on infants \u2013 but I never thought\u00a0about it. What I did was accept it \u00a0– as the absolute minimum requirement for being a Jew. I don\u2019t\u00a0fast on Yom Kippur, I\u2019ve lived very happily without a\u00a0mezuzah<\/em>\u00a0at my front door, but I\u2019m am so\u00a0glad my atheist father had me circumcized, and I would never have dreamed of not having it done on\u00a0my sons \u2013 because otherwise, according to my unconscious belief (and no doubt my father\u2019s, too), we\u2019re not Jewish.<\/p>\n

So I put my boys\u00a0through it, 12 and 16 years ago.\u00a0\u00a0And\u00a0since then, although the bleeding and crying stopped and everything turned out alright,\u00a0I realize\u00a0that this Jewish (and Muslim)\u00a0tradition is a bad one. It should be replaced, like some of the Torah\u2019s other horrific\u00a0injunctions, and instead of cutting off the foreskin, a few strands of hair should be removed,\u00a0or a fingernail should be dyed, or the boy\u00a0should get a little\u00a0tattoo\u00a0at age nine\u00a0or something.\u00a0I very much like\u00a0being a member of the Jewish\u00a0tribe, and I don\u2019t have a problem with\u00a0parents harmlessly \u201cmarking\u201d their infant sons (or\u00a0daughters)\u00a0as members of their tribe. But ritual circumcision for an eight-day-old boy, as the absolute mandatory condition of his being a Jew, is barbaric, risky and fairly insane.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, a district\u00a0court in Cologne, Germany outlawed circumcision on children except for\u00a0medical purposes.\u00a0\u00a0From The Guardian:<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/small><\/p>\n

The court weighed up three articles from the basic law: the rights of parents, the freedom of religious practice and the right of the child to physical integrity, before coming to the conclusion that the procedure was not in the interests of the child.<\/p>\n

It rejected the defence that circumcision is considered hygienic in many cultures, one of the main reasons it is carried out in the US, Britain and in Germany.<\/p>\n

After much deliberation, it concluded that a circumcision, \u201ceven when done properly by a doctor with the permission of the parents, should be considered as bodily harm if it is carried out on a boy unable to give his own consent.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Commentators said\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0unlikely\u00a0the decision will be binding, or that circumcision will\u00a0end anywhere in Germany anytime soon,\u00a0but they also said\u00a0it would\u00a0influence future legal decisions.\u00a0I hope so. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s wise to outlaw ritual circumcision, any more than it was wise to outlaw alcohol,\u00a0abortion or drugs, because it\u2019s unenforceable and by driving it underground, you create many more problems than you solve. But the principle that ritual circumcision is harmful to infants, that\u00a0it inflicts\u00a0on them a purely elective surgery that is acutely\u00a0painful, and that while accidents are very rare, the victims are literally scarred for life \u2013 this point has to be made\u00a0loudly and repeatedly to\u00a0all Jews, Muslims and other tribal types\u00a0who feel they have no choice but to put their sons through this.<\/p>\n

There is a\u00a0small but growing movement\u00a0<\/span><\/a>of Jewish parents who reject ritual circumcision, and I think it\u2019s going to spread\u00a0fast because they\u2019re saying out loud what so many Jewish parents are thinking:\u00a0\u201dWhy?\u201d And this, I believe,\u00a0is the best answer to the problem:\u00a0Stand up for your kid and say no. If you fear and abhor the\u00a0ritual, don\u2019t let anyone perform it on him.\u00a0He\u2019ll\u00a0still be Jewish if you raise him Jewish \u2013 whatever anyone says.<\/p>\n

And if my sons one day have sons\u00a0of their own and decide not to have them circumcized,\u00a0I will be one proud father and grandfather. Herzl didn\u2019t have his sons circumcized, and if it was\u00a0Jewish enough for him, it\u2019s Jewish enough for me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
http:\/\/972mag.com\/stand-up-for-your-son-say-no-to-ritual-circumcision\/49669\/<\/a><\/div>\n
Jewish Intactivism – A Male Human Rights Movement!<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/972mag.com\/stand-up-for-your-son-say-no-to-ritual-circumcision\/49669\/ By Larry Derfner |Published June 29, 2012 Stand up for your son: Say ‘no’ to ritual circumcision Even if criminalization is impractical, this week\u2019s\u00a0German court ruling against circumcision\u00a0on children, except for medical purposes,\u00a0sent a much-needed message.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been an… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[8,15,14],"class_list":["post-857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-human-rights","category-jewish-intactivism","tag-circumcision","tag-intactivism","tag-jewish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":860,"href":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions\/860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/circinfosite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}