Circumcision: Pope Francis States the Obvious, but Omits Half of Humanity

Restraining device used to immobilize infants for circumcision. Photo by James Loewen. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Restraining device used to immobilize infants for circumcision. Photo by James Loewen. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The United Nations designates February 6 of each year as an “International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.” This year,  in remarks accompanying his Angelus prayer before a crowd at St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis denounced the practice of involuntary female circumcision, saying that it “demeans the dignity of women and gravely undermines their physical integrity.”

For some reason, though, the UN doesn’t designate an “International Day of Zero Tolerance for Male Genital Mutilation,” nor to my knowledge has the Holy Father ever publicly applied his church’s catechism to the practice of involuntary male circumcision.

According to that catechism, “except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law.”

Why is it considered unacceptable to genitally mutilate infant girls, but acceptable — or at least not important enough to vocally oppose — to genitally mutilate infant boys?

There are certainly religious explanations. The Pope’s religion is an offshoot of Judaism, which practices male but not female circumcision, while female circumcision is confined to some sects of Islam and to some animist sects.

But the bigger reason seems to be simple popularity.

More than a third of male infants worldwide are circumcised. In western cultures, pseudo-scientific “medical” claims, ranging from a variant of “balancing the humors” to the notion that it reduced the desire to masturbate (a practice also pseudo-scientifically tied to various ailments), popularized the practice in the late 19th century.

Moving into the 20th century, male infant circumcision became nearly universal in the US. As each pseudo-scientific claim supporting it fell, another rose to replace it, but we invariably eventually find that infant male circumcision is almost never therapeutic, let alone universally so.

Some parents still allow their sons to be circumcised for aesthetic reasons (so junior’s penis looks like senior’s, for example), or because  fake health claims continue to circulate, but the big reason seems to be “well, that’s just what people do.”

Fortunately, the popularity of male circumcision seems to be decreasing. That’s a good thing. But it’s disturbing that we continue to entertain it as acceptable at all.

If circumcision was invented from scratch — as religious ritual or “medical” procedure — today, we’d throw its inventors in prison or cart them off to mental hospitals. Hacking off healthy parts of infants’ bodies is a violent and barbaric practice, and we should treat it as one.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way

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Charles Erwin Wilson met with military and labor leaders to determine what was good for America and General Motors. Public domain.

The Empire Center’s James Hanley tells readers of The Wall Street Journal that “anyone who wants to pay more to go green should have that choice”  (“Congratulations, You’ve Won a Higher Electric Bill!,” January 31). The subject of Hanley’s op-ed, the residents of Yonkers in upstate New York, did have the freedom to choose between two energy plans, with a higher electric bill for the renewable-sourced one. Hanley objects to them being defaulted to the renewable option, the sort of policy which has given Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism” the reputation for being more paternalist than libertarian in practice.

It’s true that “in a properly functioning market, consumers express their preferences through the prices they pay.” Yet Hanley tacitly implies that renewable options are a luxury. This has been asserted outright by John Stossel: “The market didn’t arbitrarily pick oil as the dominant source of energy.”

R. Buckminster Fuller observed that the ability of fossil fuels to burn quickly after being formed over far vaster stretches of time makes them an “energy savings account.” The short-term benefit doesn’t reflect their limited supply, with the “fabulous energy-income wealth” of renewable alternatives untapped.

Paul Krugman noted a decade ago that despite Solyndra becoming a symbol of solar as government boondoggle, that particular company’s “failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition.” One would expect Stossel rather than Krugman to be the pundit noting the limits of political policymakers’ ability to foresee market winners.  Yet when Stossel writes that “government’s ‘green’ subsidies suck money away from far more useful activities,” he overlooks how the non-green energy sources which he assumes to be simply more economical are subsidized on a much larger scale.

Helen Leavitt’s 1970 muckraking tome Superhighway–Superhoax documented how “a staggering number of private interests” formed the impetus for “the largest single public works project ever undertaken.” Amory Lovins points out that “100-plus percent subsidies” aren’t enough to draw private investment to nuclear power, so that “we can have as many nuclear plants as Congress can force the taxpayers to pay for.”

Whether your way is the greenway or the parkway, you’re not going to get very far without a clear view of the price.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, February 7, 2022
  2. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way”
    by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, February 7, 2022
  3. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, February 9, 2022
  4. “You can’t have the state highway your way” by Joel Schlosberg, Dillon, Montana Tribune, February 9, 2022
  5. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Ledger, February 10, 2022
  6. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Forest Hills/Rego Park [New York] Times, February 10, 2022
  7. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Leader/Observer [New York City], February 10, 2022
  8. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, The Long Island City/Astoria [New York] Journal, February 10, 2022
  9. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Examiner, February 10, 2022
  10. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Greenpoint [New York] Star, February 10, 2022
  11. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Brooklyn [New York] Downtown Star, February 10, 2022
  12. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Independent Political Report, February 10, 2022
  13. “You can’t have the state highway your way” by Joel Schlosberg, The Millbury, Ohio Press, February 11, 2022
  14. “You can’t have the state highway your way” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, February 24, 2022

Who Owns the Holocaust?

Romani Holocaust victims being marched to execution by troops of Romania's Nazi quisling regime, 1941. Public Domain.
Romani Holocaust victims being marched to execution by troops of Serbia’s Nazi quisling regime, 1941. Public Domain.

On February 1, ABC News suspended Whoopi Goldberg, of popular talk show “The View,” for two weeks over “wrong and hurtful” comments concerning the Holocaust.

The Holocaust, Goldberg said, is “not about race. It’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to other man.” She characterized the Nazis and the six million Jews they murdered as “two white groups of people.”

Oddly, Goldberg’s construction is partially correct insofar as it tracks pretty closely to the modern identification of  race as “a social construct.” The term “white” originated specifically as an identifier for persons not permitted to be held as chattel slaves, and Jews of the European diaspora did generally fall under that definition, despite the many other persecutions they suffered.

On the other hand, the Nazis certainly defined “Aryan” and “Jewish” as racial categories in their own “social construct,” so Goldberg was in error as to the attitudes involved. Like the proverbial Facebook relationship status, “it’s complicated.”

But there’s also a bigger question involved here. Who “owns” the Holocaust when it comes to claims of historical or current victimization?

While Jews, whatever their “race”, constituted a plurality of Holocaust victims, they weren’t the only victims, or even the majority of the victims.

Yes, the Nazis murdered six million Jews.

They also murdered nearly twice as many others, including (per Wikipedia)  non-Jewish Russian civilians, Soviet prisoners of war,  Polish Catholics, Serbs, disabled people,  Romani,  Freemasons,  Slovenes, homosexuals, Spanish Republicans, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Some of these murders were predicated on racial or ethnic grounds. Others weren’t.

The only positive aspect of the Nazis’ orgy of persecution and murder is that it inspired a continuing, persistent sentiment and determination: “Never again.”

But even that positive aspect is continually tarnished in one of two ways.

One is inapplicable invocation: For nearly any political cause, someone’s nearly certain to cite the specter of the Holocaust as an analogy to their travails. In doing so, they often, though not always, abuse the memory of the dead to score trite, trivial, or simply inaccurate political points.

The other is inapplicable claims to sole  ownership of Holocaust victim status by organizations (and states) claiming to represent the Jewish people.

“No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s [sic] systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race,” tweeted the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt.”

As Greenblatt continues, right after distorting the Holocaust, “Holocaust distortion is dangerous.”

Any time the Holocaust gets compared — credibly or not — to any issue that doesn’t bear directly on the Jewish community, Greenblatt and others can be counted on to raise the rooftops, demanding that such comparisons only be made in support of their preferred causes.

There are good and obvious historical reasons for Jews to take an ongoing interest in the Holocaust, and to be especially energetic in opposing an encore of any kind.

Those good and obvious reasons don’t justify Greenblatt et. al’s assertions of monopoly ownership, or of veto power over the use of Holocaust analogies to current events.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY