Ranting About the Issues: Circumcision and Intactivists

One of the biggest issues that comes between Jewish crunchies and the rest of the crunchy universe is circumcision.  Intactivism is a pet cause for a lot of eco-hippie minded people (and others, to be sure), and perhaps more than any other issue, it induces mouth-foaming rage.  I know people who have dropped off of crunchy discussion boards and even lost friends over this one issue.

They say it's mutilation.  They say it's wrong to do it on an unconsenting child.  There have been movements to ban it altogether, and people have been arrested and prosecuted for it in some places.  Luckily none of those efforts have born real fruit yet, but let's not kid ourselves: if it happened to shechita in Switzerland, it can happen to bris milah elsewhere.  Aaaah, galus.

The truth is, there's a body of Americans who circumcise for aesthetic reasons or to have father and son "match."  It seems that it became common practice in the US around WWI because some doctors began promoting alleged health benefits, especially for soldiers (in the attempt to prevent venereal disease).  So then there was a flood of "my son should look like me" that led to even more increased rates among the general population, and it somehow became a default or norm here in a way that never happened in other countries.  And now there's backlash, with religious circumcisers caught in the crossfire.

What scares me more than the threat of legal repercussions is the veiled antisemitism that seeps through some intactivist rhetoric.  Many intactivists are very liberal, modern-minded people who consider themselves to be socially enlightened.  Lots are simply concerned parents who see no reason whatsoever to do it.  But some of them think religion is stupid, a relic of the past.  So while they present themselves as caring, tolerant people, they're inherently intolerant of the main, original reason behind circumcision.  And while hardcore antisemitism is generally taboo, intactivism (like anti-Zionism) is a "kosher" way to express their disdain of religion.  If you call this type of person an antisemite, they'll vehemently deny it: in their eyes,  they're protecting the weak (again, see the parallel to anti-Zionism).

There are times when the antisemitism isn't so veiled.  One of the ringleaders of the 2012 San Francisco motion to ban circumcision wrote a horrifyingly Nazi-esque comic book called "Foreskin Man" that didn't really end up helping his cause in the end - it was that ugly.  I don't think all intactivists are secret Jew-haters, but there's definitely a freedom of religion issue at play.

So, what do you say or do - or avoid saying or doing - when attacked about your choice to circumcise your sons?

• First of all, don't talk about the health benefits.  They're there, but they're not overwhelming, and like in many areas of science you get dissenting opinions.  No matter where you bring your studies from, intactivists won't care, or they'll have one that they feel outweighs it.  And more importantly, the medical reasons are not why we do it.  Bris milah is a mitzvah from the Torah, period.  There's no point in conflating the issues.
• Educate yourself about the mitzvah of bris milah.  I don't mean that you should then go giving divrei Torah about it on crunchy web forums: what's important is that you have an understanding of why we do what we do and its significance over the last 3000 years of Jewish history.  Whether or not you bother to get involved in arguments (and you probably shouldn't), this is something worth doing for your own sake.
• If you're forced to have an actual conversation, don't debate.  They're coming from a moral point of view that's pretty much mutually exclusive from ours.  I think there's kind of a parallel to tattooing or cremation: to many non-Jews these are harmless or otherwise positive, but from our perspective these practices are utterly wrong.  We won't see eye to eye on this and there's no real point in trying to make it happen.

All there really is to say is that this is something of huge significance to our people, and we don't do it lightly or casually or for aesthetic purposes.  It's not female genital mutilation, which is done on people old enough to remember and anticipate pain, and has blatant lifelong negative repercussions.  It's an integral part of being a Jewish male, and the vast, vast majority of men suffer no negative effects, either as babies or as adults.  We have no interest in making it universal practice: we simply want to preserve our First Amendment right to do what we believe is right for us.  That's all there is to it.