Silence = Mutilation

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     INFORMATIVE VIDEOS:
     Facing Circumcision Eight Physicians Tell Their Stories
     Restoration in Focus   Instructional Video for Foreskin Restoration
     They Cut Babies, Don't They?   One Man's Struggle Against Circumcision
     Whose Body, Whose Rights?   Award-winning documentary seen on PBS!

THE BOOK THAT EXPOSES IT ALL:
     Circumcision Exposed
Rethinking a Medical and
Cultural Tradition

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Criminologists have long noted that criminal psychopaths exact silence from their habitual victims in order to commit, repeat, and get away with their crimes. Silence serves the perpetrator in many ways: the rapist covers the mouth of his victim to silence her screams; the child molester threatens the child with violence unless she remains silent about what is happening to her; the swindler keeps silent about the real effects of the nostrum he is trying to persuade suckers to buy.

Similarly, the circumcision crisis in the United States proliferates behind a wall of silence - the silence of the perpetrators, the silence of the victims, and the silence of the witnesses. An examination of the ways silence serves the forces of medical authoritarianism, oppression, and sexual violence reveals much about American society that is unflattering. By shattering the silence and bringing this social problem out into the open, the American people can begin the process of freeing themselves from the dangerous, destructive, and rapacious forces that thrive in silence.

The forces that have infiltrated the American medical profession in order to push circumcision on the American public use silence in a variety of devious ways.

Circumcisers are silent about the fact that circumcisers rather than independent, unbiased scientific researchers write all the published medical studies, review articles, and opinion pieces that purportedly demonstrate that the foreskin is dangerous, that circumcision is necessary (or at least advisable), or that circumcision has no ill effects. This represents a flagrant conflict of interest and therefore a serious violation of medical ethics. Circumciser-generated pro-circumcision literature proves that the compulsion to circumcise comes first: the excuses come later.

Circumcisers remain silent about the existence of the large body of unbiased scientific, medical, and ethical literature - most of which has to be published in Europe - that documents both the functions and value of the foreskin and the harmful life-time effects of circumcision. Instead of the truth, circumcisers deliver to the American public a steady stream of pro-circumcision propaganda carefully designed to play on the ever evolving anxieties of the American masses.

Circumcisers are silent about the true number of circumcision-related deaths each year. For legal and public-relations reasons, hospitals rarely, if ever, permit the public to find out when a circumciser has killed a child. Circumcisers likewise remain silent about the annual number of boys whose entire penis is either cut off or burned off during circumcision.

The forces that profit materially - or believe that they profit in other ways - from the compulsory circumcision of American boys do not permit any acknowledgment of the human right to bodily sovereignty because to do so would be to cue the American male that he actually has such a right that it is currently being violated. For instance, in a newsletter (August 1996) circulated throughout the many hospitals controlled by a large California-based HMO, one prominent American circumciser wrote a contemptuous and distorted review of the 1996 film "Whose Body, Whose Rights?," a film examining the circumcision crisis in America. Ironically, this circumciser did not even mention the name of the film in his review, for to do so would have been to acknowledge the crux of the circumcision problem to his readers.

Circumcisers remain silent about the true origins of circumcision in American medical practice. Pro-circumcision propagandists carefully construct the illusion that circumcision is both ubiquitous and traditional. Both these illusions are entirely false. Circumcisers do not want Americans to find out that Europe, Central and South America, much of Africa, and non-Muslim Asia are circumcision-free areas of the globe. The American tendency towards conformity might instinctively lead Americans to reject circumcision if they learned that European nations have never practiced mass circumcision. Native Europeans, who share the same cultural and racial heritage with the majority of Americans, are not circumcised and have never been circumcised throughout history and prehistory.

Circumcisers remain silent about the true aspects of the circumcision industry.

Circumcisers would have Americans believe that all people everywhere, (but especially Americans), have always been circumcised, even since prehistoric times. Circumcisers have never admitted that doctors first introduced circumcision on a small scale in the nineteenth century as a punishment for masturbation and as a bogus cure for such conditions as epilepsy and
paralysis. Circumcisers have likewise never told the American people that the radical practice of routine neonatal circumcision did not begin until after World War II. Circumcisers have carefully concealed from the American people the fact that routine circumcision of baby boys in America is a recent and unprecedented practice of alien and isolated origin.

Circumcisers remain silent about the true aspects of the circumcision industry. Circumcisers and circumcision profiteers sell circumcision to the American public as a comforting, reassuring, expert-recommended 'friend.' The reality of knives, steel clamps, blood, gore, and blood-curdling screams is masked by carefully constructed images of smiling babies and seemingly 'caring' fatherly doctors. Ironically, circumcisers also present circumcision as a child-friendly activity. The fact that circumcision is, rather, a severely terrifying, painful torture for babies has been precisely documented in the medical literature. This propaganda is also effective because few Americans have ever been allowed to witness a circumciser cutting a baby. Those who have witnessed a circumcision will never forget the terror and horror of the experience.

Circumcision propaganda has been so effective in the United States, that few Americans under the age of 50 have ever seen a normal, natural, intact, human penis. Even fewer have they seen how an intact human penis functions, and those who have are profoundly shocked. They are shocked, however, not by what an intact penis can do, but rather, by the realization of what the circumcised penis consequently cannot do. The circumcised man is forced to realize that because of a circumciser, he can never perform these functions experience these pleasurable sensations. This realization can be profoundly upsetting for circumcised males. In a society with as many sexual and body-related taboos as the U.S., the opportunities for average people to see such a demonstration of natural human sexual function is, however, severely limited. This situation works to the advantage of the forces that support, demand, and perpetrate the compulsory circumcision of American males. Prudery is one of the tools circumcisers use to manipulate the masses.

An additional factor that contributes to the success of pro-circumcision propaganda in America is that published information concerning the known anatomical, physiological, and sexological facts of the normal human penis are hidden from the American public. It is quite clear that calculating circumcisers have maneuvered themselves into positions of power and dominance in the fields of urology and sexology, the very fields where accurate knowledge about human sexual anatomy ought to be available. A perusal of almost all popular and professional urological and sexological textbooks demonstrates that the public's expectation for accurate information is instead silently met with inaccurate and deceptive half-truths designed to maintain the pro-circumcision party line. Due entirely to the deliberate action of circumcisers, the existence of the foreskin has been censored from American medical textbooks. A whole generation of doctors has been brainwashed into believing that the foreskin is not a part of the human body. Almost all pertinent medical textbooks illustrate the penis as being circumcised as if it were so by nature. Any textual mention of the foreskin serves only as an excuse for more circumcision propaganda.

Circumcisers remain silent about their true motivations
for wanting to cut the penises of baby boys.

Circumcisers remain silent about their true motivations for wanting to cut the penises of baby boys. While the majority of doctors who perform circumcisions may be merely following orders without critically examining what they are doing, the majority of vocal circumcision advocates appear to have hidden motivations. These men do not appear to believe the medical reasons they claim are the justifications for inflicting this surgical procedure on unconsenting minors. The excuses that circumcisers invent to justify circumcision are intended only to distract the public. The circumcisers themselves do not need these excuses. The compulsion to manipulate a little boy's penis - which often times responds with an erection - and then to use knives, blunt stainless steel pokers, clamps, or high-voltage electric current to torture and mutilate it, is not created by the weight of alleged medical evidence. No amount of coercion, propaganda, fraudulent data, or money could create in a sane person a psychological compulsion to commit such an act. Such a sadistic compulsion can only be created by a pre-existing deep-seated, irrational, psychosexual derangement. Circumcisers themselves may be unwilling or unable to understand exactly what drives them repeatedly to strap little boys down and dismember their penises, reducing them to gore.

If the foreskin really were the health hazard circumcisers claim it is, and if circumcision really were the medical miracle they claim it is, these claims would be immediately verifiable by all sane and honest genitally intact adult men. Men, having reached the age of majority (age 18 or 21) could be trusted to recognize for themselves how circumcision would benefit them and would hire a circumciser themselves. Circumcisers, however, are well aware of the fact that billions of adult men on this planet living today - and billions more who have lived in the past - have lived their entire lives happily with a foreskin and have never considered that they needed to be circumcised. Since no healthy and sane adult would choose to be circumcised, the health benefits claimed by circumcisers cannot be true. In order to hide this fact, circumcisers have traditionally insisted that babies and children be circumcised, if only because force can be easily used on them. Once caught by a circumciser, a baby cannot get away.

Circumcisers are silent about their real attitudes towards their victims and society. Circumcisers engage in self-righteous sadistic terrorism. Circumcisers hold that exasperating prejudicial belief universal to zealots that their belief ought to be shared by everyone else, regardless of particular circumstance. Even when the doctor performing the circumcision is only following orders and does not have a psychosexual compulsion to commit the act, there is an element of gratuitous cruelty in circumcision. Circumcision intensifies the already intolerable level of misery of babies born in the cold, harsh hospital environment by inflicting mindless torture, blinding pain, and life-long sexual mutilation and impairment on helpless citizens. Furthermore, circumcision is an act of terrorism. While most terrorists publicly claim to aspire to noble social goals, targeting innocent babies or children who are accidental captives is not medicine; instead, it is cowardice and thuggery.

While many prominent American circumcisers continue to insist in public that circumcision is painless to the victim, the genital integrity movement has succeeded in forcing a large percentage of the American medical profession to acknowledge the overwhelming body of scientific evidence that circumcision is, in fact, excruciatingly painful and traumatic for its victims. The public has shown itself to be very concerned about pain. Currently, a few circumcisers have taken the initiative in searching for ways to anesthetize babies for the surgery. One underlying motivation behind the use of anesthesia, however is to muffle the screams of the baby, just as the rapist muffles the screams of the rape victim. She still gets raped but no one can hear her frantic
pleas for help. The motivations may slightly differ among circumcisers. The majority seem to want to prevent anyone else from hearing the baby's screams. Others seem to want to muffle the baby because the screams may awaken a latent sense of guilt at what they are doing to the baby.

Most men who were forcibly circumcised in infancy are often unable or unwilling to acknowledge that their rights have been violated. Many actually deny that any part of their penis has been removed! Of those who acknowledge their circumcision, most still remain unaware that their penis bears a scar -- even when such a scar is painfully evident to those familiar with the appearance of an intact penis. Few are willing to stand up to the power of the medical establishment. Americans are conditioned to accept obediently the dictates of doctors.

The scope of mutilation appears too wide to allow the victims or the perpetrators any sober speculation of the problem. Though only a few decades old, the ubiquity of this abuse is already too ingrained into American medical practice to permit those directly involved any rational examination of this medical crisis. Social conditioning prevents the circumcised American male from waking up in a cold sweat, as if from a nightmare, with the ghastly realization that part of his penis is gone. The frightening reality of the American practice of circumcision is that it has induced victimization of such scale and duration as to be unprecedented in the annals of human history. Hundreds of millions of American male infants have had their penises denuded, scarred, and damaged over the course of the last sixty years. The recognition of this truth apparently would be too taxing a strain upon the collective American psyche, and for this reason, it is rarely confronted. While myth is a blinding force, it is also a buffering one, which cushions against the painful realities it conceals.

Denial of the problems that circumcision creates is widespread. Many circumcised African females insist that there is nothing wrong with them or with female circumcision. Many circumcised American males also insist that there is nothing wrong with them or with circumcision. Such fervent denial is the lid of a violently seething pot. This violence is often redirected against women and children. It is obvious that a large segment of this denial stems from the unwillingness and inability of the majority of physicians to admit error, parents to admit that they have permitted their children to be injured, or circumcised men to admit that they have been sexually impaired. No one wants to be told that he is an incompetent or misinformed physician, a misguided parent, or a sexual amputee. The debate over circumcision, however, threatens to engender just such ego-challenging responses in the average American who may feel personally threatened by any debate over this issue.

It is unfortunate that some victims of circumcision have been tricked into viewing the circumcision debate as a personal attack on their self-image. The circumcision debate is not a contest between the intact and the circumcised penis. The debate is over the right of American males to control their own reproductive organs. American women have a stake in the debate too, for if a society can deny males the right to an intact body, it can just as easily start denying females the right to an intact body - a right they currently enjoy, although this has not always been the case. It is not surprising that the medical profession is silent about the mass clitoridectomy campaigns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Another, and perhaps more significant factor in the adherence to a policy of denial, is the mass psychological effect of an individual's or a society's unwillingness to give up long held, cherished enmities. In the mid 1990s, Vietnam veterans groups vehemently opposed President Clinton's plan to open up trade with Vietnam. The State actively encouraged anti-Vietnamese propaganda during the Vietnam War. Many veterans of the Vietnam War still harbor intense anti-Vietnamese sentiments stemming from the propagandistic indoctrination they and the entire society received in order to dehumanize the enemy, encourage personal sacrifice, and make a personal issue of the State's goals. To be told that the Vietnamese are now our friends is a direct threat to the egos of those Americans most involved in these State struggles. Vietnamese must remain the enemies, otherwise what did one fight for in the first place? Of what value was ones personal sacrifice in these wars if enmity is relinquished?

Circumcision is analogous. If, after a century of indoctrination with anti-foreskin propaganda resulting in the willing sacrifice of an important part of their children's sexual organs, Americans were informed that this sacrifice was in vain and that an intact and fully functional penis is preferable, it is to be expected, that they would react with denial and anger. If one can comprehend the anger towards President Clinton when he opens trade with a former enemy expressed by those veterans who may have sacrificed a limb, or a future, one can comprehend the anger American men express towards any debate that suggests that part of their penis might have been sacrificed for nothing. The desperate scramble for new medical excuses to continue performing circumcision on unconsenting infants is partially fueled by this anger and denial.

Mythology surrounding circumcision blinds Americans to the brutality of their actions and deafens them to the screams of their own babies. The oppressive weight of this myth forces Americans to perform acts of cruelty that the rest of the civilized world could never be induced to perform. No rational Scandinavian parent would ever allow anyone to amputate part of his child's penis for the irrational reasons given by American circumcisers. No sane Scandinavian man would elect to have the most sensitive and functional part of his healthy penis to be amputated for any reason. American culture, however, is the object of a different variety of hidden constraints. Myth is a blinding force that allows no free thought or independence.

The American people are largely unaware that debate over circumcision is opposed and suppressed by most American human rights organizations, bioethics organizations, the medical establishment, and the State. This may be because most of the men and women who control these organizations are either themselves circumcised or the wife, mother or other family member of a circumcised male and thus likely to be in a state of denial over the sexual disfigurement caused by circumcision. While they may offer an unbelievable range of excuses to legitimize their unethical actions, the underlying reasons for their actions are to be found in the deepest and darkest realms of the human psyche. The illogic of their reaction against honest discussion of the circumcision problem indicates the inexcusable presence of a tyranny of hypocrisy and closed-mindedness within those organizations that claim to be dedicated to the improvement of the quality of human life. It appears that all other controversial issues are open to debate save this one. Most American human rights organizations willingly debate female genital mutilation (only if in other countries), child abuse, child labor, torture (only if in other countries), free speech, and the like, but open discussion over the right of the male to keep the body he was born with is suppressed.

That circumcision is a violation of medical ethics and a violation of human rights is an uncomfortable notion for Americans, steeped as they are in the myth that human rights abuses occur only in other countries. While it is acknowledged that the United States government and its agencies have perpetrated crimes against the citizens of other nations, there has only been slow and grudging acknowledgment of the crimes committed by non-governmental U.S. institutions against Americans individually. It appears to be easier for Americans to realize that some big corporations have willfully polluted the environment than to realize that the American medical industry has willfully violated human rights. State and federal governments, however, have failed to intercede on behalf of the American people to protect them from the fraud and violence perpetrated by representatives of the medical profession. The discriminatory legal and societal attitude towards children in the United States contributes to this situation, as does the denial of the problem by the victims and perpetrators alike.

The United States government, however, offers no valid excuse for its continued refusal
to protect the human rights of its own citizens against the aggression of circumcisers.

Upon closer analysis, it is immediately perceptible that the State is not entirely to blame for not protecting the citizens of the United States from circumcisers, since governmental institutions are only as enlightened as the citizens who staff them. The United States government, however, offers no valid excuse for its continued refusal to protect the human rights of its own citizens against the aggression of circumcisers. Healthy body parts are amputated from non-consenting citizens who are allowed no legal recourse should they object to the violation later in life. Lawmakers ignore the evidence from the rest of the civilized world. They ignore the fact that circumcision has been illegal in many parts of Europe. To those who object to having been mutilated and take their grievances to court, the standard judicial response is that it is impermissible to object to the mutilation of the penis, since the practice is medically sanctioned in the United States. Circumcision is medically sanctioned for no other reason than because circumcisers and circumcision profiteers have shrewdly maneuvered themselves into positions of authority where they can control information about circumcision, the penis, and the effects of circumcision on the penis. American medical textbooks that deal with the penis or circumcision are largely written by circumcisers or circumcised males.

Male circumcision is an atrocity rendered invisible due to its near universality and due to the supporting myths blinding the victims and aggressors alike. If Americans agree that female genital mutilation in Africa constitutes a human rights violation, then male genital mutilation in America must also be a human rights violation, unless one is prepared to argue that African females have a human right to body and genital integrity and American males do not.

History will brand the American victims of circumcisers as fools or collaborators
with this system of oppression if they fail to act now to stop the circumcisers.

Regardless of what one believes about the alleged merits or handicaps of the circumcised penis, all Americans should be concerned with the fact that the circumcision of infants and children necessarily requires that the child's human rights to freedom of choice, individual sovereignty, and personal autonomy be violated. These violations last a life-time. Circumcision requires that the child be taken advantage of in his temporary condition of helplessness. Because infants and children are unable to give their consent, circumcision is therefore an issue of oppression, force, coercion, and domination. Circumcision of infants and children is therefore a despotic act. It is in the interest of all Americans, be they in favor of the circumcised penis or not, to demand an immediate end to this system of despotism and oppression. If a baby in America is not safe from knife-edged despotism, no one is safe.

History will brand the American victims of circumcisers as fools or collaborators with this system of oppression if they fail to act now to stop the circumcisers. Americans cannot afford to be silent any longer. Silence provides the cover circumcisers require to carry out their mutilations on their unwilling, struggling victims. Silence coerces parents into turning their backs on their babies in their hour of need.

It cannot be acceptable in a civilized society to forcibly hold a male against his will and, without his consent, cut off a normal, healthy part of his penis. It does not matter who holds the knife to the baby's penis or what reasons s/he gives for their actions. It does not matter who agreed to let the circumciser cut the baby. It only matters that the child does not consent to the cutting. It only matters that the mutilation lasts a lifetime. As long as there is silence, there will be mutilation. As long as Americans continue to tolerate in silence the sexual mutilation of their baby boys, they will continue to place themselves in jeopardy of increased victimization. When a child's screams for help are met with silence, it is not merely his penis that is mutilated: his humanity and the humanity of his parents is also mutilated. Behind this silence, however, reverberates the clatter of the scalpels of the circumcisers.

That circumcision is a human rights violation is an uncomfortable notion for Americans.

Debate over circumcision is opposed and suppressed by most collaborating U.S. human rights organizations, bioethical organizations, the medical establishment, and the State. Some of this stems from a desire of those in positions of authority, regardless of their own genital condition, to be politically correct and tolerant of individual diversity as well as cultures that practice circumcision. A more likely explanation, however, is that most of the men (and women) who control these organizations are either circumcised (or have circumcised partners or children) and are thus likely to be in a state of denial over the damage that circumcision causes. They often erroneously view this forced genital alteration as an asset rather than a sexual disfigurement. The illogic of their reaction indicates the inexcusable presence of a tyranny of hypocrisy and closed-mindedness within those organizations claiming to be dedicated to the improvement of the quality of life on this planet. All other issues are open to debate save this one. U.S. human rights organizations willingly debate female genital mutilation, child labor, torture, free speech and the like, by the right of the male to keep the body he was born with is denied. That discriminatory legal and societal attitude towards children in the United States contributes to this situation, as does the denial of the problem by victims and perpetrators alike.

That circumcision is a human rights violation is an uncomfortable notion for Americans, steeped as they are in the myth that human rights abuses occur only in other countries, or that the forced removal of part of one's genitals is only a human rights violation if it happens to females or passes a "severity test." While it is acknowledged that the United States ha perpetrated crimes against the citizens of other nations, there has only been slow and grudging acknowledgment of the crimes committed by American society as a whole against Americans individually.

In light of such brutal and massive human rights violations inflicted upon its own citizenry, American democracy can hardly be considered superior to any form or totalitarianism. Serious scholars would have a rather difficult time reconciling Thomas Jefferson's idea of democracy with the democracy of mutilation we suffer under today.

Male genital mutilation...must also be a human rights violation - unless one is prepared
to argue that African girls have a basic human right to physical integrity
and self-determination but American boys do not.

Male genital mutilation in America is an atrocity rendered invisible due to its universality and due to the supporting myths blinding the victims and aggressors alike. If Americans agree that female genital mutilation in Africa constitutes a human rights violation, then male genital mutilation in the U.S. must also be a human rights violation - unless one is prepared to argue that African girls have a basic human right to physical integrity and self-determination but American boys do not.

The scope of mutilation is far too wide to allow sober speculation by the victims or the perpetrators. The ubiquity of this abuse is too ingrained into American medical practices to permit rational thought. Societal coercion prevents the circumcised American male from waking up in a cold sweat, as if from a nightmare, with the ghastly realization that a part of his penis really is gone forever. The frightening reality of the American practice of circumcision is that it has induced victimization of such scale and duration as to be unprecedented in the annals of human history. Millions of infants annually have had their genitals damaged in the United States over the course of the last sixty years. The recognition of this truth apparently would be too taxing a strain upon the collective American psyche, and for this reason, it is never confronted. While myth is a blinding force, it is also a buffering one, one that cushions against the painful realities it conceals.

Many circumcised African females insist that there is nothing wrong with them. Many circumcised American males also insist that there is nothing wrong with them. Such fervent denial is the lid of a violently seething pot. Such violence is, of course, redirected against those perceived to be weaker, usually women, children and animals. Denial of the problems created by male genital mutilation is widespread. It is obvious that a large segment of this denial stems from the unwillingness and inability of the majority of physicians to admit error, parents to admit that they have permitted their children to be injured, or circumcised men to admit that they have been sexually impaired. No one wants to hear that he is a misguided physician, a misinformed parent, or an amputee. The debate over circumcision, however, may just engender such ego-challenging responses in the average American who feels personally threatened by any debate over the issue.

Circumcision is to male reproductive choice what abortion is to female reproductive choice.

It is unfortunate that some victims of circumcision often view the circumcision debate as a personal attack on their self-image. The circumcision debate is not a contest between the intact and the circumcised penis. The debate is over the right of American men to control their own reproductive organs. Circumcision is to male reproductive choice what abortion is to female reproductive choice. American women have a stake in the debate too, for if a society can deny males the right to an intact body, it can just as easily start denying females the right to an intact body - a right they currently have, but this has not always been the case. The mass clitoridectomies in the 19th Century should never be forgotten.

Another, and perhaps more significant factor is the adherence to a policy of denial, the mass psychological effect of an individual's or a society's unwillingness to relinquish long held, cherished enmities. Recently, Vietnam veterans groups vehemently opposed President Clinton's plan to open up trade with Vietnam. Many veterans of World War II still harbor intense anti-Japanese sentiments stemming from the propaganda they and the entire society received from the U.S. government in order to demonize the enemy, to encourage personal sacrifice, and to make a personal issue of the State's goals. To be told that the Japanese or the Vietnamese are now our friends is a direct threat to the egos of those Americans most involved in these State struggles. Japan and Vietnam must remain our enemies, otherwise what did one fight for in the first place? Of what value was one's personal sacrifice in these wars if enmity is relinquished or reversed?

The desperate scramble for new medical excuses to continue performing genital mutilation
on unconsenting infants is partially fueled by this anger and denial.

Circumcision is analogous. If, after a century of indoctrination with anti-foreskin propaganda resulting in the willing sacrifice of an important part of their children's sexual organs, Americans were informed that this sacrifice was in vain and that a whole penis is after all a good thing, it is to be expected, that they would react with anger or denial. If one can comprehend the anger toward President Clinton when he opens trade with a former enemy expressed by those veterans who may have sacrificed a limb, or a future, one can comprehend the anger American men express toward any debate that suggests that part of their penis might have been sacrificed for nothing. The desperate scramble for new medical excuses to continue performing genital mutilation on unconsenting infants is partially fueled by this anger and denial.

Upon closer analysis, it is immediately perceptible that the State is not entirely to blame for not protecting U.S. citizens from circumcisers, since governmental institutions are only as enlightened as the citizens who people them. However, the U.S. government offers no valid excuses for its continued refusal to protect the human rights of its own citizens against the aggression of circumcisers. Healthy body parts are amputated from defenseless non-consenting citizens who are allowed no legal recourse should they object to the violation later in life when they actually have they capacity to defend themselves. Lawmakers ignore the evidence from the rest of the medically-advanced world. To those who object to having been mutilated and take their grievances to court, the standard judicial response is that it is impermissible to object to the mutilation of the penis, since the practice is medically sanctioned in the United States. Circumcision is medically sanctioned because circumcisers and circumcision profiteers have maneuvered themselves into positions of authority and influence. American medical textbooks that deal with the penis or circumcision are largely written by circumcised men. Moreover, most circumcised men are unable or unwilling to acknowledge that their rights have been violated. Many actually deny that any part of their penis has been removed. Few are willing to stand up to the power of the medical establishment. Americans are conditioned to accept obediently the dictates of societal institutions and the State.

Circumcision mythology blinds Americans to the brutality of their actions
and deafens them to the screams of their own babies.

Circumcision mythology blinds Americans to the brutality of their actions and deafens them to the screams of their own babies. The oppressive weight of tradition compels Americans to visit these acts of cruelty, which the rest of the civilized world could never be induced to perform. No Scandinavian parent would ever allow anyone to amputate part of his child's penis for the obviously irrational reasons given by American circumcisers. American culture, however, is the object of a different variety of hidden constraints. Myth is a blinding force that allows no free thought or independence.

Until now, most Americans of every political persuasion categorically refused to recognize the gross human rights violation of circumcision. While some may grudgingly accord the female the right to control her own reproductive organs, the male is denied any such rights. We who know the truth of the intact penis must speak up. History will brand us as collaborators with a system of oppression if we do not act now to stop the circumcisers. We will be silent no longer.