There is a famous statement attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller, who was imprisoned by Hitler’s National Socialist regime and barely survived the concentration camps.
They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Niemöller’s statement teaches us that we should guard against government oppression, even when we are not the target, because it may be just a matter of time before the goons of the state shift their attention to us.
Nothing can compare to the horrors of Hitler’s National Socialists or the brutality of various communist regimes, so I certainly do not want to imply any moral equivalence, but I can’t help but thinking about what Niemöller said as I contemplate the various hare-brained proposals being imposed on people by San Francisco’s nanny-state buffoons.
Last week, I put up a post about the city banning Happy Meals toys. That certainly seemed absurd, but the craziness is reaching new levels with a possible referendum on banning circumcisions.
One city resident is proposing a ballot measure that would ban circumcision in the City, according to the San Francisco Examiner. If passed in November 2011, the measure would change San Francisco’s police code “to make it a misdemeanor to circumcise, excise, cut or mutilate the foreskin, testicle or penis of another person who has not attained the age of 18.” The punishment for those who choose to cut away anyway would be up to a $1,000 fine and up to one year in prison.
What’s next, mandatory sensitivity classes? Morning calisthenics with the exercise police? Banning leather belts? Is there any limit once we acquiesce to the notion that other people have the right to tell us how to live our lives?
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All that the SF initiative will accomplish is move infant circumcisions to Oakland and San Mateo. It will also brand SF as anti-semitic in the eyes of many Jews. Even in the eyes of Jewish families who do not circumcise (there are many such families outside of the USA, BTW).
One would think that there is an epidemic of routine infant circumcisions has broken out in SF hospitals. The contrary is almost certainly the case. Northern California has one of the lowest newborn circumcision rates in the USA. Given that parents tend to be like sheep when penis appearance is concerned, RIC is likely to fall to zero in Bay Area, within the lifetimes of many readers of this post.
If you want to end routine infant circ on the USA, get health insurers to stop paying for it. Then get the American medical literature to be more honest about the extent of complications. Then watch malpractice insurers sharply increase the premiums of circumcisers, who will then double or triple what they charge to do it, or stopped doing them entirely. I predict that American routine circumcision will end when it become too dear because of malpractice liability exposure.
A much better law would be one, passed by the state of Califormia, making it a crime to circmcise a minor without state of the art pain management.
The internet has done much to spread the news that circumcision reduces sexual pleasure and functionality, and that many North Americna women free spirits who have tasted both cut and uncut, prefer the latter. More and more women of childbearing age hate circumcision because it can be sexually damaging. Most young women see themselves as having an unimpeachable right to the best sex possible. That right is incompatible with routine circumcision.
Sean,
I’m generally with you on all your points and agree that libertarian purity tests are flawed. Obviously I disagree with you on the need for circumcision laws, but I think you’re considering the issue rather than accepting a blanket dump of accumulated cultural nonsense on the topic in place of critical thinking.
Perhaps just for clarification, I don’t take an absolutist position that male children should never be circumcised. I’m an absolutist only where there is neither need nor consent. There are medical instances where it is the best option. Where there are less invasive options to resolve a medical need, I think parents should choose that less invasive option. But that’s common sense which can’t be legislated in a way that prohibiting non-therapeutic intervention can be. With medical need for some intervention, I wouldn’t want the government to interfere. It’s a bad option, but it’s the least bad option available where need exists.
Also, laws aren’t my first choice here. This proposal will not pass. I don’t hold any hope for people coming to their senses about what they should – and should not – do to their children. I don’t hold any hope that anything resembling equal protection is coming out of politicians, either. They’re all too happy to fawn all over the brilliance of parents no matter what they decide. My only hope with these proposals as they come up is that they put the issue in the open. Given the low quality of discourse and thinking they’ve generated here and in an earlier attempt in MA, I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Ultimately, I think some combination of the courts and slow cultural change is the only way to achieve sanity.
Tony:
All good points, especially the unequal protection between boys and girls. However, I don’t think I was quite clear enough in my previous comment to what I was getting at.
Libertarians commonly state that people should live their lives so long as they don’t violate the rights of others. I can very easily understand the argument that circumcision is a violation of another person’s rights. Unfortunately, there are many instances where a parent must make potentially life-altering decisions for their children, even when those decisions are based on intuition and pseudo-science. Circumcision is one of them. Vaccinations are another. Do I expose my child to the horrors of diseases to protect them from a potential harm in the vaccines themselves? If the majority thinks I should vaccinate my kids, should there be a law forcing me to do it? (I know public schools require them, but I won’t be thrown in jail or have my kids removed if I refuse.)
Personally, I think many people foolishly do not vaccinate their children out of misplaced fear. It makes sense that people have their children circumcised out of a misplaced idea that it’s ‘cleaner.’ But I don’t believe we should have a law forcing vaccinations and I don’t think we should outlaw circumcisions.
Having said all that — Just as there are good libertarian arguments for and against abortion, I don’t think it makes someone any less of a libertarian to be for such a law, mainly because it does protect the rights of people who cannot protect themselves. Perhaps, like civil rights laws, it is needed to move us forward as a society.
Sean,
I oppose abortion, personally, for the same reason you do. Politically, there is a difference. It’s possible to argue that a fetus doesn’t have rights. I’m not convinced that’s as strong an argument as people make it out to be, but it’s not entirely unpersuasive. There’s also the argument about the woman doing with her body as she sees fit. I find this compelling because the fetus needs her to survive.
But there shouldn’t be a question of whether or not an infant has basic human rights. There’s no challenging question to work out. The right to be free from objective, non-therapeutic harm is inherent. It’s protected by law for girls. It should be protected for boys.
I think the difference with circumcision, which should have little deference, and something like religious schooling, which should have significant deference, is that it’s possible to overcome the latter. It may not be easy, so parents should treat their children with respect. But it’s not impossible. It’s impossible to overcome circumcision if the child decides he wants his penis intact.
To those who hold libertarian views who think this law should be in place: Why shouldn’t we also outlaw abortion?
How can one argue that a child has the right to an intact penis when he doesn’t have the right to be born at all?
What about religious schooling? Is it okay to indoctrinate your child when many people share your view, but bad when it’s ‘weird’ like teaching polygamy?
Full disclosure: I am a capital-A-Atheist, and oppose abortion because there is no logical ‘moment’ that something stops being a fetus and starts being a human. I also feel that people should raise their children as they see fit, even if I think brainwashing them into a religion is, in my opinion, abuse.
Joe,
If you became convinced that male circumcision is objective harm, would that change your view on what’s been written here?
I’m not going to try to convince you right now, because I don’t think you’re asking me to try. I’m curious since I’m interested in the tendency for libertarians to promote liberty for individuals except where it applies to children at the hands of their parents. Parenting is not a libertarian purity test for me, per se, but it’s a big blind spot that many libertarians have.
I agree that we should generally defer to parental authority rather than governmental oversight. However, parents should receive no deference to violate the basic human rights of their children. Non-therapeutic genital cutting is a human rights issue, not a female human rights issue. That’s why the comparison to female genital cutting is valid. If I’m able to establish the comparison as a matter of degree rather than kind, then the libertarian case for government regulation (i.e. equal protection) is unavoidable.
I think the commenters here arguing against Dan’s position show, at a minimum, that there’s more involved than accepting the status quo on this topic without challenge or analysis. Again, a libertarian approach needs to be pro-liberty, not anti-government.
Tony — Mostly, I was referring to how there’s a tendency within libertarianism to be very quick to turn on their own. I’ve always thought of Dan as being an exemplar of libertarianism, yet he gets bashed all the time, both here and elsewhere, by people staking out “purer” libertarian positions. The same is true for other libertarians I admire, from Second Amendment advocates to those working in other areas.
In other words, while I don’t necessarily like the most extreme 5 percent of conservatives, they don’t deter me from labeling myself a conservative in the same way the most extreme 5 percent of libertarians have tended to deter me from going all the way and self-identifying as such.
Anyway, as for the specific issue at hand, I respect that some people feel very strongly about it, but I lose interest, in sort of a Godwin’s Law kind of way, whenever people invoke the FGM argument. Beyond what I perceive to be the false FGM equivalence, I’m not convinced it’s “objective harm” so much as it’s subjective harm.
Joe:
There’s too much to address since your condemnation is open-ended. I’ll pick James’ comment as a sample of what I think you’re getting at. He wrote:
“Regardless, the government has no business ‘regulating’ penises.”
A ban like this wouldn’t be government regulating penises, it would be government prohibiting parents from forcing objective harm on their children. Is the federal anti-FGM legislation that was enacted in 1996 flawed because it put government between parents and their daughters’ healthy genitals? It limits what parents may legally do.
I don’t want government any more involved than necessary. But limited government is different from the no government stance implied in the original post (and elsewhere among libertarians). Protecting rights, even those of children, is the legitimate task for which government exists. We shouldn’t need such laws, of course, but reality doesn’t support taking that approach. Parents have shown they can’t be trusted to not harm their children with non-therapeutic genital mutilation. There’s nothing anti-liberty about this proposition.
Or is the issue you’re having here a lack of agreement that circumcision is harm?
Most of the comments above (except those from IRONMANAustralia and James) are reminders of why, despite having strong libertarian leanings, I don’t actually refer to myself as one.
It’s bizarre that you’re suggesting that prohibiting unnecessary circumcision of healthy children is worse than banning Happy Meals. But this makes it clear you’re not thinking this issue through with the necessary depth:
“Is there any limit once we acquiesce to the notion that other people have the right to tell us how to live our lives?”
Is there any limit once we acquiesce to the notion that a child’s (boys only, of course) parents have the power to force how he will have his previously-normal genitals for the rest of his life? Why should a male care whether it was his government or his parents who forced circumcision on him? The end result of not protecting his rights when he’s a healthy child is that he is circumcised forever, whether he wants to be or not. That treats the child (male only, of course) as possessions. If we allow that, we’re just dictating who can be his master.
As libertarians, we’re supposed to believe in liberty for all individuals, not merely be reflexively anti-government. That includes liberty for children, as evidenced by already-existing statutes against child abuse (and female genital cutting). Those should be sufficient to avoid more explicit prohibition, but parents throughout history have shown they can’t be trusted on non-therapeutic genital mutilation.
Seconding Amy’s point, if the issue is nothing more than not wanting government telling us what we can and can’t do to our children, then we must trust parents to make the decision whether or not to mutilate their daughters, too. Otherwise, it’s a very bizarre notion of rights that says freedom from non-therapeutic genital cutting (i.e. objective harm) without one’s consent is limited to adults, male and female, and minors, female only.
The comparison between circumcision and female genital mutilation is completely illogical. There are serious health issues with female genital mutilation (aside from other implications in many african/asian countries).
I would bet that most men who were circumcised would pass it on to their sons for health reasons.
Regardless, the government has no business “regulating” penises.
The title should read: “First they came for the smokers, then they came for the Happy Meals …” Remember the smokers? It’s easy to forget how far gone we already are.
I can’t believe readers of this blog are so quick to decide whether they think something is “good” or not, and conclude therefore there, “ought to be a law”. There’s a third option: It’s none of your business – regardless of whether it is in fact “good” or “bad”.
Amy asks, “Are children possessions …?”
Children can’t be legally responsible for themselves and therefore someone else has to be. Would you rather kids are the “possessions” of their parents, or of the government? Because that’s effectively the choice you have.
Just as Pinko politics would have business owners trapped in a position where they take all the responsibility for their company but don’t get to make any important decisions, so to would it put parents in the ridiculous position of being responsible for their children, yet unable to make decisions for them.
The question is: Do you raise your children on behalf of the state? Are you just there to change the diapers while the state raises another obedient little taxpayer?
It’s easy to blow male circumcision way out of proportion by characterising it as “mutilation”, (technically correct, but a bunch of rhetorical garbage by connotation). But if we all just get a grip for a moment, it’s on about the same level as giving your kid a tattoo. I would never give my kid a tattoo, but frankly it’s none of my business if someone else does.
I have no problem with you talking all day about the wisdom of such things with the parents, but they ultimately need to be making those decisions.
And if you want to play the, “evidence-based” decisions game, let’s start by scrutinising how YOU raise YOUR children and how much evidence you have for decisions YOU make for them.
We could start by taking away Jenny McCarthy’s kids. And if you’re a goddamned hippie and teaching your kids nonsense about organic food, the healing power of crystals, and Keynesian economics, a reeducation camp doesn’t seem like a disproportionate response to me.
Whoever circumcised me botched it and I now have a skin bridge that tilts “it” to the left. That’s going to cost me some money if I ever decide to fix it.
There’s a big difference between making a choice as an adult that affects only yourself, and choosing for someone else who doesn’t have a say in the matter. Would you condone circumcising an adult in a coma just because they can’t say “no”?
Should parents be allowed to genitally mutilate their female children as well? (Both forms of circumcision are surgeries that are medically unnecessary, performed on a human who is too young to consent or refuse consent.)
Are children possessions parents can perform any medically unnecessary surgery on that their whims (or evidence-free belief in god) call for?