Friday, June 29, 2012

Bristling at bris

I have had two dead ended online discussions about the German court's decision to ban infant male circumcision. My opponents have invented a right called "bodily integrity" and hold that the boy must make a free and informed choice when he comes of age...arbitrarily set at 18.  And we know how many 18 year olds will be happy to have their foreskins foreshortened.

My appeal to the limits of the State's interests and powers falls on deaf and uncircumcised ears.

And mentioning the damage it would do to a 3000 year old religious community avails me nothing. This "right to bodily integrity" trumps all. "I don't want to live in a country where religion is above the law."

Well, then, I think, don't make stupid and tyrannical laws!

I, of course, being incorrigible, accuse these rightists (!) of not going far enough.  Is it not an unwarranted limitation on a child's freedom of mind, a right to psychological integrity, to have him raised in a religion he does not choose, just because his parents want him to? Why not ban infant baptism?

Then they say I am being silly.

The difference is that rightists of the above stripe are ideological rationalists and utterly in thrall to the Zeitgeist of the last ten minutes, where all sorts of "rights" show up out of nowhere: freedom from heterosexist marriage, hostile work environments, hate speech, spanking and drinks with sugar. Conservatives assume that human life and native* communities' traditions are primary and wiser and should be left the hell alone unless there is some really really really big problem involved that may justify the State's intervention.

But nowadays, State intervention is the first, not last, consideration.

For what it's worthy, psychologist Jonathan Haidt identifies six nodes of moral decision-making, found across cultures:


care/harm,
fairness/cheating,
liberty/oppression,
loyalty/betrayal,
authority/subversion,
sanctity/degradation.


His polling studies indicates that liberals are sensitive only to the first three, while conservatives add the final three to their six. Explains some things, like this discussion about forbidding male circumcision.

I bet some of my interlocutors support legal abortion...so they'd be ok with mom killing her little boy inside the womb, but once he's out, no fiddling with his wee wee...that's violate his right to bodily integrity.

*A real conservative can OK circumcision but not voodoo animal sacrifice or African child scarification because they are alien practices that offend the locals.
Whatever you think of Jews, they have been resident in America since before the Revolution and brissing the whole time. Liberals have no grounds to stand on in differentiating these practices because they do not recognize local traditions as being legally significant...unless they are non-White. So they have to make up BS "rights".

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Won't traditionalism, a formalism, have more and more difficulties of this sort?

Ex Cathedra is surely correct to point up how »"rights" show up out of nowhere« when cut off from the metaphysics or theology of natural law (Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson et al). But then obviously too »local« practices or traditions also show up out of nowhere in contrast to »alien practices« that show up from another nowhere.

Paul Tillich warn'd of the "shaking of the foundations" by Nietzschean genealogy, and the formalist traditionalist solution is to propose that stuff has no foundation at all.

The collision of our formalist multiculturalism ("all cultures are valid and equal -- especially equal") with female circumcision practised upon little girls raises the question of the validity of such medically unnecessary surgeries. One would like the kuffar state (shorn of its scientia of natural law metaphysics à la the Declaration of Independence) to be a noble (gennaios, vornehm) dog that seeks and destroys all incoming othernesses without asking wherefore. But in this case, Anglo-Saxony and Western Europe ought to have taken up a fever'd nativism. "America -- like it or leave it!"

Instead Anglo-Saxony and Western Europe have instituted multiculturalism and welcomed innumerable foreigners. Most of the foreigners enjoy western prosperity and freedom and have no wish to shake the foundations with serious attachment to the ways of the old country. But some see the eager going under of the west as the opportunity for the morals and dominion of Tawhid. How is a judiary, forbidden to think and evaluate since it's part of a kuffar state that mayn't think and evaluate except in the multicultural positivist way, to approve of our indigenous Jewish circumcision but not of the incoming wave of female circumcision?

It is true that circumcision is more ruinous for females, even when done in advanced Egyptian hospitals, than for males. But it is also true that when Cush introduced the genealogical improvement that is circumcision into Egypt it was surely seen as a grotesque bit of voodoo otherness. Ancient Greeks definitely never accepted it, nor the Italian Renaissance artists of homoeroticism.

For a long time assimilated Jews, who in America have even been insinuated into LDS genealogy, have coasted on secularist medical hygienic rationales for male circumcision -- although, as Ex Cathedra notes, no grown Jew or Muslim or Christian would consent to it. Yipes!

The anti-semitic "Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" by Mordecai Richler at least the film version gets the circumcision reality right -- a cruel grotesque blood rite practised upon the innocent. But circumcision 'makes sense' as such, when one doesn't live in the world of western secularism, humanitarianism, but in the world of otherness Jews. ... Presumably Jungians should be leading the defense of circumcision, including even perhaps the law of the knife as apply'd to little girls. On the other hand, if you don't want terrible realities even halfway into your foreground, don't maintain circumcision, even only for baby boys. In Nietzsche's terms, the humanitarian religionist has no right to do circumcision even on baby boys. ... or does traditionalism expect to use formalism to dissolve the difference between terrible and non-terrible? so that Anglo-Saxony's "protestantism's" old-fashion'd Easter parades, wherein women wore new hats, is essentially the same, equally valid with, as Aztec human sacrifice? (Today an Easter Parade would manifest to us as shot through with numinous otherness.)

Anonymous said...

My guess is that even if the female circumcision done by some Muslims for traditionalist reasons (though "traditionalist reasons" is a contradiction in terms) involved only removing the labia but leaving the clitoris intact, so that jouissance were still possible for cut women, western idealists would still wish to see it as an anti-feminist kind of practice.

That is, even a female circumcision for little girls that had more or less the same results as male circumcision for little boys would not seem the sort of multiculturalism we wish'd to establish. Cutting a baby's genitalia is a really big deal.

Maybe a feverish paranoid nativism would solve the problem, but restoring nativism in order to maintain whatever our traditions are and to search and destroy intruding foreign traditions would require using the state to intervene against the multiculturalism of the educated class, the most white privileged, etc. Perhaps at the end of such a tremendous political project circumcision for little girls would remain prohibited and circumcision for little boys would remain legal, but there really would be nothing remaining of Americanism.

Evidently our traditionalists, hostile to western Christianity and the Bible, had to import a new nativist paranoid formalism in order to reduce the state to kuffardom.

Unknown said...

OH. MY. GOD. THANK YOU! I thought I was the only one!!!!

I just found your blog, and have been reading through it for the past several hours.... I thought I was the only gay guy who hates gay culture, the only gay guy who is conservative, the only non-practicing catholic who still loves the religion, the only catholic in the US who has a quality and comprehensive understanding of the church, the only gay guy who understands and craves strong, masculine culture, and several other smaller things as well.

You remind me exactly of an older, more educated (and probably a slightly more intelligent) form of myself. I literally smiled, laughed out loud, and cheered YES!! when I first read one of your lines where you said "When I am Consul of America...". I say things like that all of the time and I am the only one I know who does so. In fact, your general story and personality resonates with me so strongly that I find it almost spooky. There are some differences, but I feel they generally have to do more with situational differences than anything else. Though admittedly, you have a MUCH higher level of self-confidence than I do, and I am not sure if you have ever damaged your body or become suicidal over not wanting to be gay before.

The one thing that I have ever really desired and found truly fulfilling as a "vocation" is to be a priest - but the sole reason that I have am not a priest is the fact that I am not straight.

There are SO many things on your blog that beautifully and concisely outline the things that I feel and "just know" but have trouble putting into words.... I really cannot explain how effing brilliant your mind is. Ok, just admitting how your blog makes me feel (understanding that I neither choose to have nor act upon such strange impulses) I have the strangest and most powerful desire to "be an apprentice" to your mind. Weird, I know, but I promise I am not some crazy freakshow. I am just drawn to intelligence and wisdom with a stronger pull than I feel for sex. A perceptive friend once called me a 'sapiosexual' because they noted that when I am "forced to interact with someone who is clearly less well educated and/or intelligent than I am my vocal and body language come off as if I am having sex with someone who repulses me, while I seem to draw excitement, pleasure, and satisfaction from having a conversation with someone who is as or more intelligent and educated than I am." I'd say this is accurate, and I have noticed that I actually enjoy being intellectually defeated by someone smarter than me far more than I do "wining" an argument with someone who is at a lower level of education and intellect than I am - I much prefer being taught by someone smarter than I am than teaching someone who is less smart than I am.

Anyways, this blog is the New Testament to me (so to speak). Which makes you my new "Paul" or something... sorry if any of this comes across as strange or off putting to you. I just wanted to let you know that I think you are just fucking awesome. In a few months I will be attending Boston College for graduate studies in theology and church history. If you are ever in New England during the next two to three years (or Dallas/Fort Worth) PLEASE email me - I'd love to have a conversation over lunch or something if you felt up to it.

(I would have sent this as an email, but I dont really use gmail or blogger much so I wasn't exactly sure how to send this to you. If you want to contact me personally you can use this gmail account - promotorfidei88@gmail.com-, but I use advocatusdiaboli88@yahoo.com far more regularly. I understand if you do not feel like conversing with me, and I promise you that no feelings will be hurt if you ignore or delete this message).

Anonymous said...

To cut an infants genitalia for the pleasure of the adults is a crime.
I was cut as a baby.
My boyfriend was left intact. I have discovered the importance, function and beauty of the intact penis.
Every male mammal has foreskin.
Mother nature or god created us that way. it is hubris to think we know better and that bits of babies require amputation.

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