As the father of three daughters, and as someone whose intellectual interests lie lately in the realm of intelligence and counter-terrorism, I can’t say that the subject of circumcision is one that I find myself particularly interested in or eager to write about. But I cannot refrain.
Andrew Sullivan has published a Male Genital Mutilation Update, in which he argues that circumcision is a crime, a form of “child abuse,” being committed on “millions of men without their consent.” It is one of a series of posts by him in the same vein over the years. John Podhoretz has called Sullivan’s argument a “psychotic diatribe,” but calling it “psychotic” lets Sullivan off far too easily.
Let’s devote only a little attention to Sullivan’s contention that circumcised men have had “most of their sexual pleasure zones destroyed” and experience less pleasure from sex than uncircumcised men. He points to some pseudo-scientific studies that purport to demonstrate this. But these studies, and Sullivan’s basic premise, rest on what is known in economics as an interpersonal comparison of utility. Such comparisons are inherently problematic if not impossible; it is like asking two people which of them enjoys listening to Mozart more; there is no conceivable way that such a comparison can be performed.
But a far more serious objection can be leveled to Sullivan’s enterprise. As Jon Levenson has noted in a brilliant Commentary article, The New Enemies of Circumcision, a “veritable alphabet soup of activist organizations has sprung up” to fight against the practice.
Their names offer a clue as to what kinds of people we are dealing with here. They include, in Levenson’s listing:
BUFF (Brothers United for Future Foreskins), UNCIRC (UNCircumcising Information and Resources Center), NOHARMM (the National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males), and NORM (the National Organization of Restoring Men) and its predecessor, RECAP (Recover a Penis).
Many of these organizations, as Levenson writes, “are not content to limit their efforts to public persuasion but seek nothing less than to make the practice a criminal offense.”
And there is more. Quite apart from the fact that circumcision is a widespread and accepted American medical practice, it is an essential rite of Judaism, a religious obligation that has bound the Jewish people together from time immemorial. However secular a Jew like me may be, it is clear that the idea of forbidding circumcision by law is a dagger aimed at the freedom to be Jewish. Nor is that merely accidental: some of the leading exponents of the anti-circumcision movement have in fact employed arguments, as Levenson shows, that are themselves openly anti-Semitic, including repetition of the ancient blood-libel.
Andrew Sullivan does not go forthrightly in the direction of a ban; he is disingenuously silent on the issue. Yet since in describing the practice he employs terms with criminal import like “child abuse” and “genital mutilation,” can there be any doubt that a ban is what he is seeking or, at the very least, that this is the logical sequel of his stance?
“Because American Jews live in one of the few countries in which hygienic circumcision is widely practiced,” notes Levenson, “they easily forget the role that contempt for the practice has played in the history of anti-Semitism.” Andrew Sullivan’s arguments may not be psychotic, but they are certainly bizarre and even freakish, they rest on a shaky premise, and they are definitely pernicious. That is plenty bad enough.
