'Circumcision is not about the rights of the child'

Article here. Excerpt:

'It is ironic, I suppose, that the Jewish and Muslim community who cannot make common cause on any meaningful issue should come together on this comedy show. To make an anti-circumcision law based on the child’s inability to choose is insanity: a child by definition cannot choose anything—whether breastfeeding or tonsillectomy. But so long as a child has parents who within common-sense parameters act in his best interests as they see them to be, we do not need judges or governments to make decisions in loco parentis. Because this is what the battle over the centimetres of foreskin is about—not Muslims and Jews versus anti-Semites but the age-old battle between individual liberty and statism—in this case the individual family unit and the state. I’ve watched statism conceal itself in many a Trojan horse: multiculturalism, feminism, human rights and so on. This time children’s rights is the thin end of the wedge. And somewhere in Germany’s dank caves, the anti-Semites may howl but they are not the predator.

Ultimately, I think circumcision is mad—but that’s because I think most religious ritual is mad—whether it is bowing knees and heads down toward Mecca or reverently tasting bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ. I personally carry out certain rituals associated with my faith as a Jew, even knowing them to be utterly illogical. They are my tribe’s rituals. Had I a male child, I feel certain I would have had him circumcised. But that would be my decision, not some advocacy commissar or Ontario judge. The medical evidence for and against circumcision is baffling. It seems to have helped prevent the spread of HIV infection and STIs—or maybe not. Statistics can be played contextually according to fashion. As for getting consent for circumcision—after reading what is involved in doing it to an adult male, I cannot believe that any man would be mad enough to consent. I am told there are men whose objects of affection are Jews and that circumcision is the price of winning their hearts. Foreskins off to them, I say, it’s clearly true love.'