{"id":68604,"date":"2018-02-27T08:00:52","date_gmt":"2018-02-27T13:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=68604"},"modified":"2018-02-27T05:21:57","modified_gmt":"2018-02-27T10:21:57","slug":"telegraph-tim-stanley-acts-of-faith-such-as-circumcision-are-no-business-of-those-with-none","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=68604","title":{"rendered":"(Telegraph) Tim Stanley&#8211;Acts of faith \u2013 such as circumcision \u2013are no business of those with none"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mr [Stephen] Evans is chief executive of the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/education\/12036287\/Britain-is-no-longer-a-Christian-country-and-should-stop-acting-as-if-it-is-says-judge.html\">National Secular Society<\/a>, the church militant of atheism. Like all extremist organisations, it\u2019s a coalition of the ignorant and the spiteful. Let me address the ignorant first. I get it: male circumcision sounds weird, even offensive. In the Jewish case, a Mohel removes the foreskin of a baby on the eighth day after his birth, a decision taken by adults that the boy has to carry for the rest of his life whether he believes in the Almighty or not.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"m_first-letter m_first-letter--flagged\">I<\/span>t sounds like it contradicts some of the basic tenets of a liberal society: children\u2019s rights, bodily autonomy and choice.<\/p>\n<p>But choice is a complicated thing. As Claire Fox argued on the\u00a0<em>Maze<\/em>, parents do stuff to their kids all the time \u2013 pierce their ears, feed them McDonald\u2019s \u2013that we don\u2019t ban because we don\u2019t want the state to take on the role of parent. Why?<\/p>\n<p>Because that would subvert another very important kind of choice: the right of mums and dads to raise their children how they wish. Across the world, they make the free choice of male circumcision without controversy. The World Health Organisation estimates that about a third of men aged 15 or over have gone under the knife; it\u2019s probably the vast majority of that demographic in the United States, where it became popular post-war.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2018\/02\/27\/acts-faith-circumcision-are-no-business-none\/\">Read it all<\/a> (registration now required).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mr [Stephen] Evans is chief executive of the\u00a0National Secular Society, the church militant of atheism. Like all extremist organisations, it\u2019s a coalition of the ignorant and the spiteful. Let me address the ignorant first. I get it: male circumcision sounds<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=68604\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,199,168,104,480,429,114,98,155,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-children","category-england-uk","category-ethics-moral-theology","category-health-medicine","category-iceland","category-judaism","category-law-legal-issues","category-marriage-family","category-other-faiths","category-religion-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68604"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68606,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68604\/revisions\/68606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}