Want to cloud a health and privacy issue? Label it "male genital mutilation" and wage an expensive marketing campaign to get it outlawed.
If you have no taste for irony, do not consider the fact that San Francisco, which practically has "women have the right to choose" in the city charter, would look odd telling women that the right to choose only applies to making babies dead and not giving them a circumcision.
There is no dearth of anti-science fundamentalism in the political fringes - human embryonic stem cell research and global warming on one side and anti-vaccine and anti-GMO people on the other side. But this is something special because it is not only anti-science, it is simultaneously big government and anti-Separation of Church and State. That is a quackery trifecta! Ignoring the health benefits of circumcision, a 60% reduction in HIV transmission and every other sexually transmitted disease, is downright crazy in a city that was as hit by HIV and AIDS as anywhere. Circumcision is practically a surgical HIV vaccine, notes Beryl Benderly.
But I wouldn't tell people they have to do it because I am not, you know, a militant kook in Frisco.
This may be the kind of issue that both sides of the American political spectrum can agree on when it comes to rights and choice. As Alex Berezow of RealClearScience puts it:
Bipartisan concern over Americans' right to privacy should make it obvious that the government has no place in regulating a small flap of skin on baby boys. If the circumcision ban initiative makes it to the ballot in San Francisco, voters would be well-advised to reject the proposal.
