This issue always gets me mad as hell. People who defend the circumcision of infant boys (as so many do in the comments of this post on Motherhood Uncensored). I’m uncompromising on this issue. It shouldn’t happen. I don’t care if you think it might “look gross” or “they might get teased” or worry that “he should look like his dad.” I don’t care if I’m making you (whoever you are) feel bad by disrespecting those reasons. Fine, they were your reasons, and you believed them, and you can’t undo your action; that doesn’t make the action right, and it doesn’t make the practice defensible.
I especially don’t care about your religious traditions. That is no excuse. Let your kid decide for himself when he becomes an adult, to do it for religious reasons. If a religion conflicts with a fundamental human rights issue (like not having a body part chopped off) I’ll take the human rights, thanks.
What really gets me is the flippant cutesy tone that people talk about this in. Think how they’d react to the same discussion about female genital mutilation. Jokes and all. People cut off their baby girls’ labia every day because they think it’s healthier, and not gross looking, and easier to keep clean, and they’ll look normal to their peers, and because it’s a religious tradition. It’s wrong. Period. And so is mutilating and amputating the genitals of baby boys.
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