No More Circumcision In San Francisco?

By Semperpapa

That may actually be a reality comes November, when the people of San Francisco will go to the ballot to decide if the practice of circumcising babies right after their birth is to be made illegal. If the measure passes, no male child could undergo the procedure before the age of 18.

The measure, which its founder calls Male Genital Mutilation Bill, gathered enough signatures to make it unto the ballot for the next local elections in November 2011, but local officials will call the bill simply Male Circumcision.

I will refrain from writing about the medical intricacies of the ban, leaving them to the experts in the field, and I will refrain from making any jokes containing foreskin and San Francisco, but I am chiming in the political and social ramifications.

Supporters of the ban are using the semantic “Genital Mutilation” to confuse potential voters in believing that the procedure is a painful and unnecessary operation, similar to the genital mutilation females are subjected to in certain cultures. The parallel is obviously misleading and misguided.

The part that is much more interesting to me is that there is a chance that a government mandated provision will be instituted to, once more, infringe on the people freedoms and rights.

For some religious faiths, circumcision is a rite mandated by their beliefs. For example, Jewish and even Muslim followers consider the procedure an order from God. The ban would be a direct infringement upon their ability to follow their religious guidelines. Just that alone should make the ban unconstitutional.

Then we have the hypocritical aspect of the measure. The proponents are arguing that they are interested in the rights of the child, that they want to protect the welfare of the baby, because children do not have a say in the matter. Ironically, this comes from a city where abortion is king and yet we do not hear any of these people complaining about the rights of the fetuses, nor outrage about the pain that fetus may feel as it is dismembered and killed.

The Jewish community in San Francisco is appalled at the prospect of such religious practice being rendered illegal by a mere group of ignorant activists, and some, and not just in that community, have raised the prospect of a anti-Semitic component to the measure. I was somewhat skeptical about that angle, mostly because the ban would also affect Muslims and not just Jews.

But then I saw the cartoon that is dedicated to the cause of the ban: Foreskin Man. Here is a shot of it.

I found it somewhat disturbing. The action hero could be a poster boy for the Hitler’s Youth and the Jews portrayed in the cartoon all have a devilish look on their faces. Is the cartoon author, a Brazilian named Gledson Barreto, going to also show Muslims in the same way, or is he going to just limit his crusade against Jewish characters? Are these people going to cower in the safety of attacking only Jews for fear of pissing off some Islamists that will put a bomb up their asses?

What also sealed it for me was the name of the president of the company distributing the cartoon: Matthew Hess. Wonder if anyone asked him if he had a great uncle Rudolph somewhere in Europe in the 1940s.

Regardless of a low budget cartoon strip, the very fact that the authorities of San Francisco are even considering such a measure is telling of the level of intrusion that we can see from the government. Sure the measure is the brain fart of Lloyd Schofield and he was somehow able to gather the over 7,000 signatures necessary to present the issue to the voters of San Francisco, but before the government places it on the ballot for the people to vote on, some research should have been made to seek clarity on the constitutionality of it. I am of the opinion that, even if passed, a legal challenge on those grounds will go very far to strike it down.

All this will be costly for the taxpayers of California, what a shock, and with the enormous problems we currently have in our state, the foreskin of newborns is really far down on the priority list.

So I sit here re-reading my words and my research, and I cannot help shaking my head. Maybe if I have a glass of wine, this whole crap will make some sense at all.

Just my thoughts!