It's hilarious how ~important~ people are making out having foreskin to be.
It's more the principle of bodily integrity - one that (personally) I value much more than some notion of religious freedom, which, in my book, shouldn't extend to permanent body modification of a person who's not able to consent to it. To use a deliberately exaggerated example, if my parents chopped off my hand as a baby because they were members of an obscure sect that demanded such, I'd be outraged, and I wouldn't much care about their protestations of "religious freedom" - unethical is unethical is unethical.
By the way, to address another valid point raised here, as someone who's used the word "mutilation" to describe male circumcision, I do understand the negative reactions to it, since it's implying parallels between male circumcision and female "circumcision", which, for the record, I
certainly don't place on a remotely comparable moral level.
I
do think the non-essential, permanent removal of a body part for cultural reasons is mutilation, however (relatively) benign it supposedly is - it's not entirely benign - there's evidence that circumcision can reduce sexual pleasure, for example. But I'd like to be clear that I'm not comparing it to much more horrific practices.
PS: In response to Morgan's above point, since I've posted in another thread on this I'd also stress that I'm not some kind of anti-circumcision activist, and the only times the topic's occurred to me at all is because of this forum.
And, the most important part of this post
:
...IMO.
Poll
