The City of San Francisco (where else?) will have an initiative on the ballot in November banning circumcisions on males under 18 years of age. Male circumcision has been a religious ritual for thousand of years among Jews. Muslims also practice circumcision. According to one of the initiative’s supporters, “It’s excruciatingly painful and permanently damaging surgery that’s forced on men when they’re at their weakest and most vulnerable.”
In other words, assert the self-appointed guardians of infant boys’ foreskins, the city government must protect newborn males from a surgical procedure that causes “pain” and is unnecessary to protect the health and wellbeing of male youngsters.
Let us substitute abortion for male circumcision in this argument. Abortion, especially partial birth abortion, where the physician punctures a baby’s skull with scissors and the uses a device to suck out the baby’s brains, is painful and denies the unborn baby or fetus the right to live his or her life. In short, abortion violates every moral principle the supporters of a circumcision ban assert they are defending. More importantly abortion violates the principles of the Declaration of Independence—the right to life and liberty–and one of the Ten Commandments, Thou shall not kill.
Male circumcision may or may not be a medical necessity but it has been woven into the religious practices of both Jews and Muslims for centuries. In short, the proposed circumcision ban violates religious freedom.
The intentional taking of a human life does not have any moral legitimacy in any society that I am aware of. But that all changed in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, when the Supreme Court said that the U.S. Constitution recognizes a woman’s “right to choose” to end her pregnancy. That is a euphemism for legalizing the killing of the unborn child.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3 states: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” If all human beings have the right to life and liberty and security of person, then the right not to be killed in the womb is an extension of the right to life and liberty and security of person. Clearly, a fetus or unborn child is a developing person. That cannot be denied.
In the final analysis, all human beings have the right not to be killed, molested or enslaved. Any compromise with these principles will give us war, abortion, genocide, human trafficking, and all the other depredations that governments have condoned or engaged in for centuries.
The protection of human liberty requires limited government so that it should not matter who is elected to office. The fact that we as a society spend so much time, money and effort to elect the “right” people into office, who usually disappoint us repeatedly, reveals the utter failure of government to protect our right to life, liberty and property.