The National Association of Evangelicals is siding with Jews and Muslims in opposition of a proposed ban on infant male circumcision in San Francisco.
“Jews, Muslims, and Christians all trace our spiritual heritage back to Abraham. Biblical circumcision begins with Abraham,” NAE President Leith Anderson said in a statement. “No American government should restrict this historic tradition. Essential religious liberties are at stake.”
Are the people in San Francisco so whacked out that this is all they have to do? With all the things in the world to worry about this would be about dead last on almost any sane person’s agenda.
This promises to be a valuable test case on how keen some courts are to mess with religious freedom. (I’m opposed to the ban, but have always been curious why evangelicals, esp. in the US, are so keen on circumcision)
I recently saw the Foreskin Man cartoons on another blog and was shocked. They seemed to play into age-old antisemitic stereotypes going back to the blood libel and beyond. This initiative to ban circumcision should be rejected.
What happened to the Sixties refrain of “hands off our bodies”?
I am not a bigot, nor am I a “hater” of humanity. But I gotta tell ya. . . if God does not do something about San Francisco, He is going to owe an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Jim, there are a lot of people here who are talking about the hypocrisy of this proposal in relation to abortion.
What we are seeing here is a new sort of antisemitism, one not based in any sort of racism or cultural prejudice but rather on liberal intolerance of religion generally. I’m seeing a lot of this in local blogs, so called social liberals attacking Jewish practice with the same language they use about Christian fundamentalism or Islamic terrorism, with the obligatory atheist straw man references to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What they don’t see is that this is illiberal intolerance of its own sort.
Even so, I am not getting a sense that San Franciscans are taking this proposal seriously. Even most local liberals are mocking this is as an absurd sideshow. The antisemitic cartoons are also really starting to raise hackles. San Francisco is a beautiful city, and most of us Northern Californians are proud of it’s beauty, but not necessarily its insane politics.
Full disclosure, I don’t live there, but I have, and several generations of my family did – but back when it was a very different city than it is now.
Attempts to engage anticircumcision advocates in conversation move quickly into antisemitism.
Alta Californian — Yes, my Dad’s family is also from that part of the country, and I just spent a week in the City. And yes, I remember visiting San Francisco as a child a number of times in the late 50s, early 60s, and it was a totally different place. A very elegant and cultured city, where people always seemed to dress well and with a sense of style. For people to walk down the street in parades in various sorts of lewd attire or in states of undress would have been unthinkable. And as a little kid, I used to think the traffic cops in their heavy dark wool uniforms, directing people at crosswalks, were like superheroes. I was totally in awe of them.
It’s basically slightly veiled theophobia. If they were really atheistic, they wouldn’t bother with theists at all, any more than they’d bother with people who believe in UFOs. But they’re not really atheists, because they’re consumed with striving against God. Thus they’re theophobes.
The great irony is that circumcision has been shown repeatedly to reduce the transmission of the HIV virus. San Francisco has been one flash-point in the medical world’s war on HIV. That this issue has not been a serious part of the debate has me dumbfounded.
#5 1945–You are correct, sir!