American Academy of Pediatrics: Benefits of Circumcision Outweigh Risks

[garbon]

Are we just sharing opinions about what other people do that we mildly disapprove of?

Indeed. I could write a tome

[Zanza]

Who was talking about outlawing something?

The Germans and a number of other European commentators, using exactly the reasoning you and Martinus and MS are advancing.

As I said before, the default legal stance in Germany is that the "physical integrity" is protected as that's considered one of the basic human rights of our constitution. If the religious ritual - not the medically indicated procedure - of circumcision should be an exception to that general rule, the argument must be made for why it should be an exception, not against outlawing it as it is already outlawed under the much more general rule.  It's not about possible medical benefits (not even the American Pediatrics go so far to make a general recommendation), but rather about whether phyiscal integrity or religious freedom should be the higher value in our constitution.

[Martinus]

There is an important distinction there BB.  You may be the worst possible parent (for the purposes of this argument only of course  ) who feeds their child crap food, sends them to a crap school and provides a crap role model.  But when your child becomes old enough to realize you are full of crap they have a choice to do things differently.  Not so with missing body part.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone can recover from what their parents did to them in childhood. There are some handicaps that are very hard to recover from.

Ok so your line of reasoning is that since we may not be able to fully recover from parent-induced obesity, we should go the whole hog and let the parents have their kids subjected to wolverine-like surgery (which would be cool) or tatoo their entire body with swastikas, right?

I think drawing the line at irreversible body modification is pretty reasonable middle ground.

[Capetan Mihali]

The circumcision issue fails to move me for some reason.    I've seen it debated strenuously IRL, too, mostly trolling either side on my part.   

I'm circumcised, but during the crucial growing-up years, I had mainly Catholic friends who were majority uncircumcised, so I just took it as a fact of life.  I remember in kindergarten peeing at the same time with my friend Rachinelli and having an "ours' look different!" moment, but beyond that...nothing much.

I guess if I had a son, I'd just go along with whatever the majority trend in my country was, which would hopefully give him less neuroses about being genitally abnormal as puberty set in.

[garbon]

There is an important distinction there BB.  You may be the worst possible parent (for the purposes of this argument only of course  ) who feeds their child crap food, sends them to a crap school and provides a crap role model.  But when your child becomes old enough to realize you are full of crap they have a choice to do things differently.  Not so with missing body part.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone can recover from what their parents did to them in childhood. There are some handicaps that are very hard to recover from.

Ok so your line of reasoning is that since we may not be able to fully recover from parent-induced obesity, we should go the whole hog and let the parents have their kids subjected to wolverine-like surgery (which would be cool) or tatoo their entire body with swastikas, right?

I think drawing the line at irreversible body modification is pretty reasonable middle ground.

No, don't be an idiot.