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Comment by AndrewThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Another mindblowing fact about USA - some tribal genital mutilation is a norm. You wouldn't believe this would be happening in a first world country at all and here you have it.

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I believe the rate has been dropping steadily, though. I sure as hell didn't do it to my son. Not my right to make that decision for him.

the proportion of infant boys circumcised in the United States between 1979 and 2010 dropped from sixty-five per cent to fifty-eight, according to the C.D.C.

I don't have a ready source, but I thought somewhere there were numbers for 2010-2020 and it was a more significant change. Like there has been a significant change in attitudes over the last 10 years.

And there's HUGE regional variation, the practice being very rare in the southwest and very common in the northeast.

I can say from personal experience, I'm in the midwest and in my entire dating career, I've only encountered two women with prior knowledge of natural men, and both of them had spent time in Europe.

So if the rate is indeed dropping here, it's happening in a younger segment of the population. (Good for them!)

I'm in Israel and didn't do it to my son. I was a bit nervous about that because well... Israel. He'll be ostracized for it...

Then I talked with his kindergarten teacher and "warned" her about his penis so she'll be "ready". She looked at me dead in the eye and said: "This is Tel Aviv, half the boys here aren't circumcised". Lol. I guess I'm not too special.

I keep thinking this might keep stoking the fire of some of the antisemitism in America.

I think it was Norway planned to outlaw all mutilations of minors and ended up with all middle eastern religions crying foul in unison which was scary. (All they seemed to disagree on was which child to harm) needles to say the law that was eventually passed was so watered down as to be (again imo) ineffective...

The view that this practice is the norm and that it's somehow so untouchable is imo scary.

However, the precedent that FGM is outlawed _despite_ religious protest, means that MGM might eventually fall too. This means that anyone wishing to preserve MGM is trying to find support for it on other grounds.

Hence the litany of "health studies" supporting the practice, so it's not just a religious issue, it's a health issue! Muddy the waters with just enough doubt to keep the debate alive instead of letting it be an obviously-settled issue like FGM.

The result is that, if you look at all the papers published on the topic, and sort them into two piles depending on who funded the research, and then look again and sort them into two piles depending on their conclusion, you'll find that you've performed the same sort twice.

The health arguments simply don't fly here in Europe though. There was a practitioner of circumcision in the Netherlands who went to court this year to argue that their income was tax deductible because it served a therapeutic purpose. The judge did not agree and wiped away the argument that it prevented future complications as well. It's still legal, but it's not health care (except presumably in rare special cases like phimosis where it may be warranted if other solutions are not effective).

It's only by making this a matter of religious autonomy that MGM isn't banned outright yet, because politicians are always really careful around matters that might anger religious groups. Especially right-leaning politicians or those who belong to a Christianity-based political party.

The WHO prevalence map of circumcision[1] is quite interesting. It's uncommon in most Europe, Middle- and South America, and Asia (except in muslim-majority countries like Pakistan, Indonesia, and South Korea where it was apparently introduced by the Americans after WW2).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_circumcision

My circumcision was just the first violation of my body the Evangelical church put me through as a child -- finally culminating in my chemical balding at Billings West High School in 1998-99 after coming forward about my childhood sexual abuse in the Lutheran Church.

If you read anything about modern evangelical thought the single worst thing a child could demand is their autonomy, and well, anyway, every time I look in the mirror right-wing America gets to kick me in the face again.

Wicked culture, all of it.

They're not even Christian, really, if they're still doing this horrible Abraham-and-Isaac stuff. Jesus was the blood sacrifice to end all blood sacrifice. Paul makes this abundantly clear.

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