This is fucking insane

Now I'll admit it when I read the headline, Is Ritual Circumcision Religious Expression? in the New York Times Magazine this morning, my immediate answer was, No, of course it isn't. It is genital mutilation. That was just when I read the headline. Then I went ahead and read the article, availble here (registration or BugMeNot maybe required), and I genuinely didn't believe what I was reading.

It was the bit about oral suction, or metzitzah b'peh, that got me going. Now for those of you who, like me, were unaware of this practice and haven't read the article, I suggest you stop reading now and try and block it from your mind, forever.

Still here?

We'll continue then. Oral suction is, and you could not make this shit up, the practice of cleaning the wound made by the circumcision by sucking the blood from it. Now I'll repeat that cause frankly I don't believe what my fingers are typing, it is the practice of cleaning the wound by sucking the blood from it. Or to put another way, it is the practice of chopping a bit off the end of a babies dick and then sticking the dick in your mouth.

Now this is not religious expression, this is insanity. And apparently it happens 2000-4000 times a year. So by the time I leave America next year, something like 3000 baby boys will have had their bleeding cocks sucked by mohels (I have no idea what a mohel is, and now never want to know).

The article lost me somewhat when it started waffling on about whether this practice could spread disease — apparently there have been only seven recorded cases of babies developing herpes following the operation — because they missed the point. The point is not whether this practice is dangerous, the point is this practice is fucking insane. Really, there is no other way to describe it. Any practice that involves grown men sucking the dicks of little boys is wrong. And them doing it because the dick is bleeding from a wound they created, doesn't make it any more right. Does anybody out there disagree with those statements? Well, yeah, apparently they do.

The real debate should not be about whether this crazy dick sucking process should be allowed to take place. It shouldn't! The real debate should be about whether infant circumcision should be allowed to take place at all. If you can sufficiently indoctrinate your child such that when he grows up he voluntarily has a piece of his dick chopped off, that's fine by me. Hell at that point I'm all for him getting someone to suck the blood off it if he wants. But doing it to a baby who has no choice in the matter, it's not really cricket.