Pro-pro-against?
This is the really funny part that's been kicked up in this entire genital kerfuffle. For some reason these are the same people getting worked up who don't tolerate abortion rights in this country. To be at all logically consistent, if the point is the forced aspect of control, one would have to be pro-choice and anti-forced-circumcision. Once you understand that both are to be, as they should be, largely voluntary procedures, it's sort of a rhetorical nonsense problem anyway. But it's still inconsistent to be, in essence, against both abortion rights and mandated circumcisions.
Naturally of course, that's not the real "why this became an issue". Controlling women is okay for social conservatives and their political figures. But certainly not controlling penises by removing a tiny bit of skin and possibly sexual sensitivity. Heavens no! What a terrible idea!
27 August 2009
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2 comments:
I've read this post and the link at least twice. I'm confused. Huh? Mandating circumcisions? Abortion? Wha?
Mandated circumcisions was the immediate reaction of various people throughout the right-wing, including some libertarians like Sullivan that I linked to there, to the CDC's proposal to recommend them for the rather modest health gains they give. Once I paused and read the CDC release myself rather than the news releases that phrased it as a mandated procedure, it was apparent that there's a disconnect between this reasonable suggestion, something the CDC and other public health agencies do all the time, and a mandate.
The disconnect has more of an emotional reaction to the snipping off of foreskin and its phrasing is very carefully setup as an issue of privacy and bodily autonomy. In which case, that's precisely the same arguments being used in support of abortion. So it seemed sort of inconsistent to be for the one and against the other.
There are specific trade-offs being mentioned that lend itself to individuals ignoring a recommendation that I can fully understand if I don't agree with (supposed sexual sensitivity reductions as a trade-off with relatively low risk of disease transmission in American society as compared to say Africa where circumcision by itself is extremely useful for public health). But the sort of visceral reaction for that rationale only makes sense if it's perceived, wrongly, as a mandate, because there's nobody forcing anybody to get circumcisions except parents at this point. Including the CDC/government. Once that's out of the way, there's only a sort of irrational emotional attachment to a flab of skin that in most cases, people never had anyway because it's a reasonably widespread procedure in America.
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