Speaking of ethnic and cultural ignorance while thinking about the audacity of dope among so-called “birthers” who imagine that President Obama would be uncircumcised if he had secretly been born to Muslim parents in Kenya, Indonesia, or for that matter Hawaii I started wondering if the statistics being used by the CDC to recommend universal circumcision demonstrated real biological differences or only cultural/religious behavioral ones.

Because while it might be great if the mechanical act of being circumcised reduced one’s risk of acquiring HIV from unprotected sex. It would be kind of… unfortunate if being culturally and religiously Jewish, Muslim, Protestant Christian, or one of the much smaller subcultures worldwide that emphasize circumcision and… a lot of other hygiene, monogamy or fidelity-related, and discouraged use of alcohol and injection drugs.

I don’t know. But I’d probably want to find out before I endorsed or bitterly mocked proposals of universal circumcision to prevent contracting HIV. Or, for that matter before I endorsed or mocked proposals for universal adoption of Judeo/Christian/Islamic conventions.

Or said “who needs condoms if I’m already circumcised.” Which I suspect is what vast numbers of men are likely to say should the recommendation come down.

(Just to be clear I don’t know if social correlations have been made. But do I want to know.)

The AP’s Michelle Roberts, via The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has an update on the recently raided pedophilia/polygamy “compound” in El Dorado, Texas.

SAN ANGELO, Texas — Lawyers for a polygamist sect that is the subject of a massive child-abuse investigation argued in court Wednesday that although its members’ multiple marriages and cloistered ways may be unusual, they have a right to their faith and privacy.

Gerry Goldstein, a San Antonio lawyer representing the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also told a judge that the search of the temple in the sect’s West Texas compound is analogous to a law enforcement search of the Vatican or other holy places.

...

Prosecutor Allison Palmer countered that the purpose in seizing the documents was to uncover evidence of criminal activity, not to malign a religion.

State troopers and child welfare officials began a search of the FLDS compound in Eldorado last Thursday after a 16-year-old girl there called a local family violence shelter to report her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. The search warrant covered all documents related to marriages among sect members, including photos and entries possibly written in family Bibles.

Rest of the article here.

Look. Here’s the deal. First of all it’s fine with me if people want to practice polygamy. It’s even fine for me if they want to do power-gradient role playing if that’s what floats you and your partner’s and your friend’s boats. Freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of sexual self-determination all demand that I tolerate that whether or not it floats my boat.

But nothing in church doctrine (even, as far as I know, LDS doctrine) dictates that girls under age 18 are obliged to participate. And, sorry, too bad for doctrine if it did. (Which, remember, it doesn’t) Worshipers of the (Biblical version) of Baal might argue their doctrine required live cremation of all first-born children before age three, and claim that their “compound” be treated like the Vatican too. And that would be tough shit for them too.

And just to be clear it wouldn’t be tough shit for child sacrificers because children are God’s little angels. No more than it’s not tough shit for the child molesters in El Dorado because children are holy innocents. It’s because in the 21st Century, in all but the most thoroughly regressive cultures, children are recognized as distinct civil, moral, ethical, and spiritual entities from their parents and therefore children are not their parents to dispose of or consume in ways that subtract from the child’s ability to take up the reins of the world upon reaching adulthood!

As Hannah Arendt said back in Between Past and Future (paraphrasing since my copy is in storage), we can train dogs because we know we’ll be here to train their offspring and their offspring’s offspring as well. With humans, though, we cannot train children. We must instead educate them because we know we will not be there to train their children and certainly not to train their children’s children. And this is the fallacy of all claims (conservative and liberal) that society may have no say in what custodial adults choose to do with their children because they’re only “their” children for 18 years. After that they become our fellow citizens and our children’s fellow future colleagues, partners, friends… or — if their parents have self-indulgently fucked them up enough — they become burdens on ours and our children’s society.

Children grow up. They outlive their parents. And until they’re old enough to give full, informed, and legal adult consent that’s why no matter how religiously, culturally, or socially tolerant we otherwise might be, it’s a problem letting even passionately, sincerely religious adults buy, sell, “marry,” or just slake their pedophilic lust into the bodies of theirs or other people’s children. It’s why the more tolerant our society the less we could tolerate infant sacrifice, no matter how religiously justified. It’s why we can’t tolerate “honor killings.” It’s the real reason why surgical genital alteration on children is intolerable as well. It’s even why we can’t just let these fuckers yank girls out of 5th grade for fear that they might learn enough to get themselves and their own children away from the nightmare cultural-not-religious cycle of female child-sexual and child-labor slavery.

It also happens to be why I call this blog Real Adult Sex. Just in case anyone ever wondered.

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Oh, and just for the record, from another AP story on the same “sect” (emphasis mine)

Church leaders have kept a strict hold on every aspect of FLDS life – from the modest prairie-style clothes worn by members, to amount of time their kids stay in school and which house a family calls home.

Marriages, which sometimes have included unions between teenage girls and older men, are arranged through the church’s prophet and leader. Sect dissidents say the rules got even tighter in 2002, when Warren Jeffs took over the church.

Jeffs, now 52, demanded more from followers, asking for steep increases in the 10 percent monthly tithe. Dozens of men were excommunicated. Their wives and children were given to other men deemed more worthy.

Source: Seattle P-I

Sorry, it’s possible for adult men to consent to a system whereby they can be excommunicated for failing to sufficiently obey the whims of their leader. And it’s possible for adult women to consent to a system whereby they obey the same leaders no matter how loathsomely he dehumanizes them. (Do I even need to say that in all cases one would always be ready at the drop of a penny to, um, aggressively support and defend men or women participants’ right to withdraw from their self-imposed agreements at any time.) But neither the men nor the women have the right to consent to the sale or “gift” of their children to anyone else in the course of their role playing. Because, no that it needs saying, children are first and always people.

So I was just reading a nifty article in ScienceDaily that says the surface of people’s tonsils, with their high levels of immune cells, may facilitate oral HIV/AIDS infection.

Last winter there was a big brouhaha over a finding that male circumcision substantially reduces HIV transmission. Which is great for those who are too stupid, irresponsible, uneducatable, or prohibited by social or moral “reasons” to use condoms, but otherwise highly inferior compared to, well, using condoms.

And putting two and two together I was wondering if we’d start to hear calls for pre-emptive tonsillectomies from the (largely judeo/christian/islamic, homophobic, and/or doesn’t reduce my enjoyment so go for it) groups that were endorsing compulsory circumcision earlier this year. (Note: many of the sources cited point to, but don’t necessarily support, the represented positions.)

But since it’s been a while I needed to go find a link. And while I was Googling around I ran across a remarkable new post from Kelly Jean Cogswell of A dyke abroad (It also appeared as an editorial in Gay City News)

Cut It Off – And Stop AIDS
By: KELLY JEAN COGSWELL
07/26/2007

Women are dying of AIDS while some researcher bends over his penis, smiles at it fondly, and imagines what little alteration would make it an all-purpose tool safe to use again.

He’s not the only one with his dick in his hand. Each new report on male circumcision pumps up the protection believed to be provided by that little snip, snip so that pretty soon I expect to see the numbers not only show the procedure will stop HIV dead, but also reduce global warming, and maybe slow the Iraq war, too.

...

In the real world of South Africa, there’s very little difference in HIV rates between communities that snip, and those that don’t. In Northern Zambia, the difference only lasts until the young men move to the big city with its bright lights and Manolo Blahniks, metaphorically speaking.

Forgotten also are all the circumcised men in the States that dropped dead before ARV’s came on the scene. A foreskin more or less didn’t help them. Or don’t faggots count when you’re counting heads?

...

Women aren’t factored in at all except as a vector of disease. While millions of dollars are already pouring into circumcision programs even if only men have foreskins to whack off, women are struggling for equivalent funds for female condoms and microbicides – never mind programs with as vague a goal as girl power, the real key to HIV prevention.

It’s young women getting AIDS these days. UNAIDS says we already make up 60 percent of the 15 to 24-year-olds living with HIV/AIDS.

In sub-Saharan Africa girls of that age are three times more likely to be positive than their male peers. In the Caribbean it’s 2.5 times. Why? Because in most places we still don’t own our own bodies. Men think we’re dirt and they treat us that way.

...

It’s time for AIDS activists and researchers to shift their attention away from the penis and see the connection between hate and HIV and dead women. Only power will save us, not cuts, not even condoms unless we can make men wear them.

And if somebody still insists on tinkering around with men’s dicks to stop spreading HIV, maybe they should do a more comprehensive procedure, call it the Bobbitt and cut the whole thing off.

Read these excerpts in context here.

At last! Someone who can’t possibly be accused of mere anti-circumcisionism who’s nevertheless unimpressed by the yet-another-latest-and-greatest-bestest reason why we always have and always will need to circumcise men…

...but not, evidently, tonsillectomise them.

Whatever. Again, I’m not particularly fanatic about circumcision one way or another (for instance Circumcision may not impact sexual sensation, also from ScienceDaily, sounds perfectly plausible.)

It’s just that if it were any other body part but the foreskin, for far less than half the benefit of condom use, the conversation just wouldn’t be happening. Or certainly not happening under the same terms.