Polygamist Arrested

ariesathena
Thu, 31 Aug 2006 15:48:15 +0000

Dig - I really don’t think that you can compare female genital mutilation (which is downplayed by reference to “female circumcision”) and circumcision. In one, the girls’ bodies are literally mutilated - they can barely pee, they have their periods for two weeks, they have infections, and the entire point is to make intercourse extraordinarily painful so that they don’t run about on their husbands. Any religious “justification” is a justification for destroying the bodies of girls in ways that would simply not be tolerated of men nor of beasts.

Male circumcision does not interfere with normal bodily functions; causes only short pain; and is a hygenic issue. It is not designed to make intercourse as horribly painful as possible.

Hum… hygiene v. repression. I am not religious. Frankly, I don’t care if people think that their religion demands that they sip wine every week along with eating a small piece of dried bread; if their religion demand that they fast, or, if their bodies cannot tolerate the fasting, find another way to sacrifice; or if their religion demands a circumcision. In all cases, the body is left in sound, functioning condition afterwards, as it is our duties as sentient creatures to do for each other. Religion does not excuse anyone from that mandate, IMO.

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RE: marrying age. While I think that it’s reprehensible, any way you cut it, to be married at age 14, there’s at least some social justification for it that is entirely absent with pre-pubescent girls. In times when people never lived very long, getting married and having babies when physically able to do so wasn’t the worst of ideas that we’ve come up with. Six-year-old girls, though… most laws (for millenia) have not recognized the ability to form consent (in the legal sense or as the ability to sin) until age 7.