I admit that the Family supplement in Saturday’s Guardian is one of the supplements that would normally only get read on a five hour train journey, at a point when I’d even tried to read the (quite tedious-enough) Sport and Work supplements twice. But I read its front cover today and it managed to push half a dozen rant buttons.
Precis: A Jewish man married to a non-Jewish woman has a family crisis over circumcising his new-born son. He caves. The baby is circumcised.
It’s not even a crisis of conscience for him. It’s mainly an argument between his wife’s and mother’s consciences. His wife is determinedly against it but his mother and father bring the whole weight of their kin and community down on him.
The whole article made me almost speechless with rage. (Yes, I know you are possibly wishing that “almost” wasn’t there) Mutilating new-born babies on behalf of an imaginery divine being. Argh. Grrr. That enrages me enough.
But what really gets me angry is the way it shows that being reasonable and benevolent and NOT CRUEL can become such a weak position in the face of irrationality that the nutters may always win, because the rest of us are too moral to fight them with the level of ruthlessnessness they show.
The wife and her family put feeble rational arguments against it but, basically, they are too afraid of upsetting the baby’s father’s family and terrified of not respecting his Jewish identity and so on. So the baby’s needs are sacrificed through the weakness of their opposition.
The paternal grandmother makes her son swear that he will allow it, using the full force of Jewish mother emotional blackmail which I had assumed was a racist myth. For example,
“My mother began to weep openly on the Phone. “Oh my God, Neal, I can’t believe you’re doing this to me”
Well, he isn’t doing anything to her, is he? He is just suggesting for one minute that he mightn’t do something barbaric to his firstborn.
The wife expresses a passionate and reasoned defence of her newborn, but she’s an amateur, constrained to fighting fairly. In the end, facied with opening a “wound in his family life that might take years to heal,” she gives in.
Rationally – what if parents decided to drll 4 inch nails into their baby’s hands, without anaesthetic? I think we all know what even the slackest Social Services departments would have to do about that.
But, what if the parents felt that their God required them to mutilate their offspring? Their whole community has done this since time immemorial. They would reject to own this child as one of them if it isn’t mutilated. (The writer’s father told him they would not accept the baby as their grandson if he wasn’t circumcised.) In that case, what would the Social Services department do? Nothing , it appears, as it doesn’t even constitute recognised child abuse. It seen as Jewish and Muslim custom and somehow has come to be treated as a normal procedure by US citizerns of every faith.
I am first in the queue for arresting the perpetrators of the even more horrifying mutilations practised on some teenage Muslim girls – and ideally applyng a little “eye for an eye” justice on them. However, I can’t see why baby boys have to be without protection from sadistic body-hating lunatics either.
We don’t want to offend people so devastatingly damaged by their own cultural values and their ingrained feear and abhorrence of nature that they actively campaign to mutilate infants?
Who excuse it on the grounds of worshipping a God who actually deliberately added bits to baby boys with the express intention of having them painfully sliced off? It’s that evil Satan deity again, obviously.
If it’s so great, why not leave the babies to grow up and make a choice on reaching adulthood. That is the age at which we allow people to choose to get gender reassignment or breast augmentation – however stupid we may find these choices – because it’s their bodies and they can do what they want with them.
Noone remembers the first few days of life so we can kid ourselves that newborns don’t suffer. Anyone with children is aware that newborns suffer infinitely more intensely than anyone older. Hunger drives them to hysteria in afew moments, for instance. They don’t just feel a bit peckish.
I suspect this is like baptising newborns only taken to psychologically disturbed lengths – religious believers rightly suspect that few people would make these insane choices if they were left to their own devices when they have achieved an adult level of rationality. They somehow manage to coopt new “believers” at an age when the recruits’ skulls haven’t even closed over, so they can avoid having to make a convincing case for following their belief system.
And the rest of us, we should be ashamed of our weakness in the face of fanaticism. I don’t mean we should throw out our moral sense – that’s what stops us being like the fanatics, thank *** (insert name of non-denominational, non-montheistic, deity or wise person of your choice) . I mean that, where we have a choice, as this mother and father did, we should never agree to things that we know are deeply wrong, just to avoid offending people. We have to start somewhere.
A healthy dog wouldn’t let you start cutting into its pups without taking a good measure of flesh out of your hand. As humans, we just let our religious leaders do whatever they see fit to our offspring. If we can’t even protect our own newborns from mutilation, we definitely represent an evolutionary cul-de-sac, our culture having evolved to the point at which it overrides our own natural instincts to protect our young.
Technorati tags: atheism,religion,circumcision.child abuse.mutilation, society, Guardian, family, emotional blackmail
