The Universality of the Cause of Genital Autonomy

The following is the text of remarks that were delivered as a recorded address on 7 May 2022 to commemorate the Worldwide Day of Genital Autonomy.

by David Balashinsky

May 7th, 2022 is the tenth anniversary of an important event in the struggle for the right not to be subjected to genital cutting: the ruling by the Regional Court of Cologne recognizing that nonconsensual, non-therapeutic penile circumcision constitutes an illegal act of bodily harm.  That ruling is commemorated every May 7th as the Worldwide Day of Genital Autonomy.  

But a commemoration is not a celebration.  We observe the anniversary of that ruling because it was so groundbreaking, but that also demonstrates how far we have to go.  Instead of congratulating the Cologne Court for its decision, we should be asking, "How could any court, anywhere, conclude otherwise?"  If we lived in a world in which fundamental human rights were universally respected, the Cologne ruling of May 7th 2012 would not be commemorated because it would not be exceptional.  In a just world, rulings such as the one we remember today would be foregone conclusions and would not even be worth noting.

But we do not live in a just world.  The events of the past few months have brought that forcefully to the forefront of the world's consciousness.  As I speak these words, the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine has left thousands dead, millions displaced, leveled whole cities, threatens European peace and security and threatens the entire post-World-War-Two world order.  In my own country, the right of girls and women to obtain safe, legal and timely abortions is under greater threat and already is being curtailed more than it has at any time during the past half century.  Meanwhile, the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls continues unabated, racial justice continues to be an unfulfilled dream and antisemitic and AAPI hate crimes as well as hate crimes against other minorities continue to proliferate.  Elsewhere around the world, rape continues to be used as a weapon of war in such places as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Ethiopia.  In Afghanistan, girls and women are denied the most basic human rights, including the right to an education, and are treated virtually as prisoners in their own homes.  In Chechnya, gay men are systematically rounded up, imprisoned and tortured.  Globally, authoritarianism is ascendant while democracy is in decline.

These, of course, are not the only human-rights violations going on in the world today, nor are the crises humanity is faced with limited to obvious and direct human-rights violations.  As I speak these words, the world has barely begun to recover from the worst pandemic it has seen in over a century, with more than five million dead.  Meanwhile, climate change, resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, poses a serious threat to the environment, to the world's economies, to millions of lives, even to civilization itself.

In short, there is no end of problems and no end of human-rights abuses that deserve our attention.  So, why this one?  Why focus on the right of genital autonomy?

The short answer is that one doesn't choose to care about the right of genital autonomy, just as one doesn't choose to care about human rights more generally.  The only choice we make is whether we are willing to apply our ethical beliefs consistently.  That means looking beyond our prejudices and moral blind spots and finding the common denominator of all human-rights movements.  

That common denominator, I believe, is the right to be secure in one's person, and that means the right of bodily integrity.  That is the most basic, the most important human right there is.  It precedes every other right because, without it, no other right matters.  As William Douglas put it, "The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."  The right to be free from harm, from violence, from sexualized violence; the right to control one's reproductive health and to decide for oneself whether and when to have a child; the right to an open future; the right to control one's gender identity; the right to control one's sexuality; the right to embrace or reject one's parents' religious beliefs without having had them literally marked in one's flesh without one's consent; the right to experience the fullness of one's body and one's humanity; the right to be oneself - all of these can be distilled down to the right of bodily integrity and that right means nothing without the right of genital autonomy.  For, if bodily integrity is the starting point of all other rights, that right is especially inviolable with respect to the most private, vulnerable and intimate parts of our bodies.  If one accepts the premise that fundamental human rights belong to every human being equally, and that all human bodies - including children's bodies - have a right to exist without being harmed, scarred, surgically altered or modified without consent, one has no choice but to oppose every form of involuntary, non-therapeutic genital cutting.

The right to genital autonomy, then, is simultaneously universal and quintessential: the essence to which all other rights can be distilled.  

For me, personally, the right to genital autonomy is also the conclusion to which the many particulars of my own experience and identity inevitably lead.  Accordingly, there is no type of genital cutting - from nontherapeutic neonatal penile circumcision to intersex surgery to infibulation - that does not contradict every belief I hold and, even more deeply, everything I am.  I'm Jewish; Jewish ethics demand that I oppose genital cutting.  I'm a healthcare worker; medical ethics demand that I oppose genital cutting.  I'm a secular humanist; humanism demands that I oppose genital cutting.  I'm a feminist; feminism demands that I oppose genital cutting.  I'm a progressive; progressivism demands that I oppose genital cutting.  I'm a supporter of abortion rights; the principle of bodily autonomy demands that I oppose genital cutting.  I'm a human being; my very humanity demands that I oppose genital cutting.

Why care about genital autonomy?  Because we are human, and genital autonomy is the most basic human right there is.  Genital cutting, which deprives children of their right to genital autonomy, may not be the only human-rights violation occurring around the world today, but the consistent application of our ethical beliefs demands that, if we oppose any human-rights violation, we must oppose this one.

I began by observing that today is an important anniversary in the struggle for genital autonomy.  Yet, even as we commemorate the Cologne ruling of May 7th, 2012, let us rededicate ourselves to creating a world in which that ruling is no longer exceptional but, instead, is remembered as having been only the first in a series of similar rulings, statutory-, medical-, and cultural advancements that culminated in a world in which no such rulings ever again were necessary.  When all children, everywhere, are protected from genital cutting, that will be when the Worldwide Day of Genital Autonomy represents not an event that we commemorate but an achievement that we celebrate.

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David Balashinsky is originally from New York City and now lives near the Finger Lakes region of New York.  He is a licensed physical therapist and writes about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.  He currently serves on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.
 

 

Brendon Marotta's "The Abuse of Jewish Fragility": a Case Study in How to Undermine the Cause of Genital Autonomy through Jewish Scapegoating and the Use of Classic Antisemitic Tropes

by David Balashinsky

I got involved in intactivism (the name by which the cause of eradicating male genital mutilation is informally known) approximately nine years ago.  Like many, my introduction to the movement and my initial involvement with it as an advocate were both through social media.  Within the first few hours of my involvement, I came up against the strand of antisemitism that, unfortunately, runs through this movement in its social-media incarnation.  I'm referring to unambiguously antisemitic jokes and comments and classic Jewish scapegoating.  This antisemitism was by no means a majority of what I found among intactivists on Facebook but it was, nevertheless, conspicuous and ever-present.  Needless to say, it was disappointing.  Equally disappointing was the tolerance for it among some Facebook intactivist-group page administrators who, when I brought examples of antisemitism to their attention, not only remained silent about them but refused to remove them from their groups' pages.  I spent many fruitless hours combating the antisemitism coming from some of my fellow intactivists who supposedly were on the same side of the barricades as I was (and still am) in the war against male genital mutilation and many fruitless hours combating the acquiescence and complicity of those administrators who tolerated the antisemitism in our midst.

This is part of the context in which Brendon Marotta's latest blog post must be understood.  His post, entitled "The Abuse of Jewish Fragility," contains one antisemitic slur after the other and should not go unchallenged.  I actually have no choice but to challenge it.  After all, just a moment ago I criticized those Facebook intactivist page administrators for their complicity in antisemitism through their silence about it.  If I say nothing about Marotta's unabashed antisemitism in the present case, what, then, am I, if not equally complicit?

There are several other specific, important and even urgent reasons to speak out against Marotta's Jew-baiting.  First, there is a correlation between antisemitic hate speech and antisemitic violence.  The one always precedes the other.  To the extent that antisemitic hate speech increases, we can expect acts of antisemitic violence to increase also.  That is why countering hate speech is an essential part of defending against antisemitic violence. 

Then, of course, there is the simple and even more basic reason that a libel against a person, a race, a nationality, an ethnic group, a religion, a sex, a gender or a sexual orientation is wrong, unethical and injurious on its face and should not, as a matter of justice but also just on principle, go undisputed.

Still another reason why all who oppose antisemitism - and not just antisemitism but any sort of hate speech - cannot remain silent when they encounter it is that acquiescence - silence - contributes indirectly to a culture of normalization of hate speech.  If one doesn't meet it head on, the only inference that others not already intellectually armed against it are left to make is that the hate speech is essentially valid or, at the very least, is no big deal.  

But still another reason - and this is as important to me as an intactivist as the others are to me as a Jew - is that the antisemitic rhetoric now coming from someone as notable in our movement as Brendon Marotta is precisely the sort of thing that threatens to undermine the legitimacy and credibility of our movement.  It is no secret that there have been proponents of male genital mutilation - including both Jews and non-Jews - who would like to throw the baby out with the bathwater because they view the genital autonomy movement as being intrinsically antisemitic.  Marotta's antisemitic post does nothing but provide these genital-mutilation proponents with more fodder.  Antisemitism coming from intactivists validates their view and plays perfectly into their hands.  They have only to point to Marotta's latest blog post and say, "You see?  We told you so."  This threatens to undermine the cause of genital autonomy itself.

With that, I turn to Marotta's post, in which he portrays "Jewish people" and "Jewish organizations" as "abusers" and intactivists as "victims."  In fact, Marotta couches his entire argument in the language of psychology and relationship violence:

When someone is in an abusive relationship, they often have to construct a mental model of their abuser in order to survive.  They use the mental model to understand what will set off the abuse.  If I do this, will they attack me? . . .

. . . In an abusive relationship, this keeps the victim in a state of hyper-vigilance, because if at any point they fail to do this labor, they risk being harmed.

Unfortunately, this abusive relationship dynamic is the current dynamic between activists against genital cutting and Jewish fragility.  If at any point those against circumcision express their thoughts or feelings in a way that triggers Jewish fragility, they risk abuse.

This is so patently absurd and so manifestly antisemitic that it barely warrants any explication of how it is these things.  And yet, I have an obligation to follow through and be specific.  So - 

The very act of framing the relationship between Jews and intactivists as one of "abusers" (Jews) and "victims" (intactivists) as Marotta does throughout his post is yet another iteration of the classic antisemitic myth of insuperable Jewish power.  This trope goes back centuries but perhaps reached its zenith with the publication, in 1903, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated pamphlet that purports to detail a Jewish plot for world domination.  To this day, antisemites ascribe tremendous power and influence to Jews, even to the point of controlling the space lazers that supposedly were responsible for causing the 2018 California wildfires.  "The Jews" are habitually represented by antisemites as being the hidden puppet masters behind the powerful forces that we do see (the government and corporations) that control the lives and limit the freedoms of the virtuous non-Jewish masses.  We supposedly own all the banks, all the media and everything else that matters and woe betide anyone who dares oppose our agenda.  Marotta sounds every one of these themes:  "Jewish organizations also have systemic power with the ability to deplatform people from social media, put them on law-enforcement watch lists, or remove them from banking and payment processors."  Marotta's calumnies against Jews could not be more blunt or unambiguous: "The only people responsible for the abusive Jewish reaction to activists against circumcision are Jewish abusers."  The point is further illustrated by a picture at the head of the post depicting a man's hand clenched into a fist, presumably representing Jewish might crushing the spirits of intactivists.

It goes without saying that when Marotta refers to "Jewish organizations," "Jewish people" or "Jewish fragility," as he does throughout his piece, he means the Jews, collectively, as though we are all part of one hegemonic and monolithic entity: a worldwide cabal of evildoers.  Nowhere in his post - not once - does Marotta specify that he is reserving his criticism for Jewish proponents of male genital mutilation.  Neither, for that matter, does he ever once acknowledge the existence of antisemitism within intactivism, nor acknowledge the presence within intactivism of so many Jews.  The word Jewish appears fifteen times in Marotta's post and, literally, every time it appears it is used in such a way as to equate Jewishness with support for genital mutilation and with suppression - "abuse" - of intactivists.

Moreover, every time the word Jewish appears, Marotta uses it to equate Jewishness with an unflattering, a dysfunctional or a positively malevolent characteristic.  This, too, is classic antisemitism: attributing specific discreditable traits to Jews as though these loathsome characteristics are quintessentially Jewish and inextricable from Jewishness and from Jews.  Thus, the phrase "Jewish fragility" (or a close variant) appears nine times.

I have learned, since publishing this essay in March,* that the phrase "Jewish fragility" appears to be the concoction of the well-known Christian nationalist and antisemite, Fritz Berggren.  Berggren defines "Jewish fragility" as

feelings of discomfort a Jewish person experiences when they witness discussions around race and theology.  This may trigger anger, fear, guilt, and violence. . . . 

Manifestations of Jewish fragility commonly include accusing others of what they do themselves. . . .   

One manifestation of Jewish fragility was the reaction to Jesus Christ, who verbally chastised them for hypocrisy.  As a result, the Jews used their power and influence (Jewish privilege) to have him executed.

By linking Jewish and fragility into a single entity - Jewish fragility - Berggren reifies "fragility" as a quintessentially Jewish trait, although, to be fair, he does the same for progressives and liberals: 

Progressive fragility refers to feelings of discomfort a Progressive experiences when they witness discussions around race and theology.  This may trigger anger, fear, guilt, silence, and threats of violence.

Progressives may find it difficult to speak to unapologetic Whites. The Progressive person may become defensive, and the White person may feel obligated to comfort the Progressive because we live in a Progressive-dominated environment.

The essential points that Berggren is making in both of these constructs is that the worldview of those whom he labels as "fragile" - whether Jews or progressives - is fundamentally wrong and self-serving and that both groups occupy positions of overwhelming (and undeserved) power.

Apparently following Berggern's lead, Marotta extends the concept of "Jewish fragility" to the genital-autonomy movement.  What Marotta seems to be claiming, therefore, is that Jewish criticism of intactivism could not possibly have any merit: that it is attributable exclusively to an inability on the part of Jews to tolerate any criticism of circumcision.  This represents Jews - and, again, Marotta is not speaking only of those Jews who oppose our movement but of all Jews, since he uses "Jewish fragility" to refer to a Jewish trait - as not only being congenitally thin-skinned but entitled: as though Jews regard themselves as being special and beyond reproach, which is, of course, another classic antisemitic stereotype.  This is not just unfair to Jews but perversely so.  Among the most vociferous critics of anything that can be claimed, with a modicum of historical and epistemological accuracy to be "Jewish" (when such criticism is not simply antisemitism pretending to be more than it is) are Jews themselves.  We're notorious for infighting and disagreeing with Jewish religious and political orthodoxy.  That, indeed, is one of the reasons why there is such a schism among Jews now regarding the extent to which we should or should not refrain from criticizing what many of us believe to be the Israeli government's mistreatment of the Palestinians.  And it is one of the reasons why there is such division among Jews on the topic and the practice of infant circumcision.  None of these distinctions matters to Marotta: it's all the Jews this or the Jews that.  Or, to be more precise, it's Jews are the abusers and intactivists are their victims.

Other than the antisemitic myth of vast Jewish power, the predominant theme of Marotta's post is that of Jewish malevolence.  This, too, is a classic antisemitic canard that Marotta not only recycles but reinforces by the repetition of the word abuse (or some variation of it) throughout his piece.  That word - abuse - appears no less than thirty-three times, and every one of those times Marotta uses it to characterize what Jews allegedly do to intactivists (and without an iota of supporting evidence, incidentally).  On the other hand, the word victim appears nine times and, every time, Marotta uses it exclusively to refer to intactivists.

It was news to me that Jews ever encouraged violence against intactivists, and yet Marotta actually makes this claim:

If at any point those against circumcision express their thoughts or feelings in a way that triggers Jewish fragility, they risk abuse.  This abuse can take the form of anything from slurs and insults to actual incitements of violence.  When Jewish people call activists and survivors "Nazis" or "antisemites," they are inciting violence since violence against people in those categories is socially permissible.

Just for some perspective here, in 2018, eleven Jews were murdered and six other people - four of them police officers - were injured in an act of antisemitic violence at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.  The very next year, 2019, the ADL recorded the highest number of antisemitic incidents annually since it had begun tracking them 40 years previously.  Five of these incidents resulted in fatalities and over 90 of them were violent assaults.  In 2020, Jews were the targets of 58% of all religiously-motivated hate crimes despite representing only about 2% of the population in the United States, according to FBI statistics.  In 2021, antisemitic incidents, including vandalism, harassment and assaults, again reached a record high, that is, to that date, "the highest number on record since [the] ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979."  Just this past January, four attendees at a synagogue in Texas were taken hostage at gunpoint by a man who believed that Jews have so much power over the government that he (the hostage-taker) could extort one (a rabbi in New York) into making the government release a convicted terrorist from prison.  This is the other part of the context in which Marotta's latest blog post must be understood.  With thousands of antisemitic incidents occurring annually in the United States alone, with Jews being assaulted and murdered for being Jews, Marotta has taken it upon himself to denounce the scourge of  Jewish "abusers" and taken up the cudgels on behalf of their "victims."  How many intactivitsts have been assaulted or murdered this year, last year, or any year for speaking out against male genital mutilation?

Besides accusing Jews of "abusing" and "inciting violence" against intactivitsts, Marotta accuses Jews of imposing "social sanctions" on intactivists and "deplatforming" them.  Yet the only evidence he offers in support of this allegation is a link to an ADL article in which it announces a partnership with Big Tech to devise strategies to effectively combat online hate speech.  But Big Tech and even the ADL do not treat intactivism, per se, as "hate speech."  And the last time I checked, there were scores and probably hundreds of Facebook groups and pages dedicated to eradicating male genital mutilation.  They're all still up and running and just as busy as ever.  I, myself, am an administrator of five of them.  I post anti-genital-mutilation comments, articles and videos almost every day and have done so for the last nine years and have never been censored or even warned by any social media platform that my intactivism constitutes a form of hate speech or risks running afoul of the platform's "community standards."  On the contrary, it has been my experience that, when I have reported antisemitic or other types of hate speech to Facebook or another platform, it is almost impossible to get the platform to remove it.  I haven't maintained a careful record of the statistics but I suspect that my experience is much like that of others who have tried, and failed, to get hate speech removed from social media platforms (or, conversely, had their own perfectly innocent posts taken down erroneously).  In general, I would say that I succeed in getting Facebook to remove explicitly antisemitic hate speech less than half the time.

It's hard to divine what Marotta's goal is in posting this attack on Jews.  With his recent obsession with "systemic pedophilia," the logical inference is that he is trying to curry favor with the Q-Anon crowd.  But it's hard to see how that constituency might be induced to oppose genital cutting.  Overwhelmingly, Q-Anon supporters tend to be precisely the sort of reactionary, aggressively patriarchal and easily-duped conformists who are most likely to endorse and perpetuate the deeply ingrained American custom - not the Jewish custom but the American custom - of nontherapeutic infant circumcision.  Does Marotta think he can win them over by appealing to their antisemitism?  Possibly.  But that seems like a long shot, particularly if the goal is to eradicate MGM throughout our society: Q-Anon remains a cult with a minority following.  And if Marotta is trying to appeal to the alt right more broadly, he will likely run up against the same devotion to circumcision that was so eloquently articulated several years ago by one of that movement's leading lights, Milo Yiannopoulos.

It's a shame to see an ally and an intactivist go over to the dark side, promote antisemitic stereotypes, risk alienating both Jewish and non-Jewish potential converts to our cause and undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the genital-autonomy movement.  But, whatever his aims, this is what Marotta is now doing.  Marotta's time and efforts would be far better spent doing what the vast majority of intactivists actually are doing: working to change a culture in which male genital mutilation has been medicalized and normalized, and doing so not by scapegoating Jews but by changing hearts and minds and by winning over those who do not yet share our convictions by appealing to them on the basis of our shared humanity, common decency and respect for fundamental human rights. 

*This post was revised on 15 May 2022.  Berggren's coinage of the phrase "Jewish fragility" was brought to my attention by Rebecca Wald,  for which I here offer my acknowledgement and gratitude.

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David Balashinsky is originally from New York City and now lives near the Finger Lakes region of New York. He is a licensed physical therapist and writes about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.  He currently serves on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.
 

 

 

Maryland Acts To Protect Cats' Bodily Integrity. Human Males Will Have to Wait.

by David Balashinsky   

Before I say anything else, let me state for the record that I am a cat-lover and that none of my cats ever has or ever will be declawed.  I have long believed that cat declawing is both inhumane and unethical, which is why I supported efforts to ban this practice in my home state of New York and support banning the practice nationwide.  As a New Yorker, I am proud that my state became the first to institute a statewide ban on cat declawing.  Maryland is now about to become the second state to do so.

Still, I have mixed feelings about these laws.  The reason is that they create a legal protection for cats that, to this day, is denied people like me.  I am referring to human males and to the practice of removing boys' foreskins when not medically indicated, a practice known as nontherapeutic penile circumcision or, simply, "circumcision."  As much as I love cats, it is impossible for me not to view these anti-declawing laws from the vantage point of someone who had part of his body cut off without his consent.  Given that the part of me that was amputated without any rational reason or justification is just as important to me as cats' claws are to them, it is hard not to look at cats now without feeling some envy and resentment.  I feel demeaned by the fact that my cats now have a greater legal right to bodily integrity than I would if I were the same age as they are.

A word about the male prepuce, or foreskin, is in order.  Like cats' claws, the prepuce has evolved and been retained through millions of years of evolution because it serves important physiological functions.  One of these is providing protection for the glans penis in exactly the same way that the clitoral hood, its homologous counterpart in females, provides protection for the glans clitoris.  (Anatomically, both the male foreskin and the female clitoral hood are identified as the prepuce.  Unlike boys, however, in New York, Maryland, and the rest of the United States, girls are allowed to keep theirs.)  In addition, histological studies demonstrate that the male prepuce contains numerous sensory receptors.  These specialized, light-touch mechanoreceptors (known as Meissner's corpuscles), are found in particularly dense concentrations in the body where light-touch sensation is most important, including the finger tips, the lips and, it should come as no surprise, the prepuce.  Several studies have demonstrated that the male prepuce is, in fact, the primary sensory apparatus of the penis.  All of the sensation that the prepuce enables an individual to experience is lost forever when this part of his penis is removed.  Moreover, once the glans penis has been permanently deprived of its natural protective covering, the glans, itself, becomes keratinized (dried out and "toughened up"), making it even less sensitive.  In short, the male prepuce is not "excess skin."  It is an integral and essential part of a person's penis.  It is a part of his body that that individual has as much a right to keep as he has to keep any other part of his body.  And it is a part of his body that he has as much a right to keep as cats have to keep their claws.

A word about nontherapeutic penile circumcision is also in order.  Non-therapeutic neonatal penile circumcision (like cat declawing) is always performed without the consent of the one subjected to it.  It always entails the painful removal of a normal, functional and highly erotogenic body part.  And, in virtually all cases, penile circumcision is imposed on a child not because there is a pathological condition that needs to be treated or a congenital deformity that needs to be corrected but, rather, for reasons involving custom, social conformity, convenience, socially-influenced aesthetics about human genitals, specious medical rationalizations and medical profiteering (often at tax-payer expense through Medicaid funding).

Both cat declawing and penile circumcision, then, have a lot in common.  Both entail the removal of a normal, functional body part.  Both entail a surgical removal of healthy tissue without any regard to the wishes of the cat or infant human male who is subjected to it.  Both practices are inhumane, unnecessary, unjustifiable and unethical.  Not surprisingly, because the campaigns to ban both practices are based on the same philosophical and moral principles, many of those who oppose cat declawing also oppose nontherapeutic penile circumcision.  

Also not surprisingly, just as there are parallels between the practices themselves, there are parallels between the movements to eradicate them.  Consider the legislative history of the New York bill banning cat declawing.  Passage of Senate Bill S5532B / Assembly Bill A1303B  did not happen overnight but was the culmination of a long, arduous process that required its sponsors to persevere against the stiff headwinds of an entrenched practice.  The legislation had to overcome the opposition of the New York State Veterinary Medical Society (NYSVMS), which opposed it for perfectly rational and, it could be argued, even humane reasons.  It had to overcome the resistance of legislators who, no doubt, initially scoffed at the notion that this is a matter worthy of the legislature's time.  It had to overcome the opposition of those who believe that cat "owners" have a right to make such medical decisions on behalf of their cats.  And it even had to overcome the opposition of those who profess to love cats and probably do love cats just as much as I do.  It is important to remember, in this regard, that people who subject their cats to declawing are not evil, sadistic monsters who want to harm their cats.  These are people who love their cats but who, for one reason or another, believe declawing to be beneficial, appropriate and ethical.  Thus, it was the combined resistance of societal and institutional acceptance of cat declawing, including, especially, the normalization of it, that the bill's sponsors had to overcome in order to get it passed.

These types of opposition to New York's anti-cat-declawing bill all have parallels in the campaign to eradicate nontherapeutic penile circumcision which, like the campaign to ban cat declawing, also faces stiff institutional and cultural headwinds.  Banning nontherapeutic circumcision is opposed by medical trade associations (whose members profit handsomely from the procedure), such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, both of which have issued statements that implicitly or explicitly endorse nontherapeutic circumcision while conceding that it is not medically necessary.  These position statements include one rationalization after the other that exaggerate the purported benefits of penile circumcision while minimizing or ignoring its incontrovertible harms.  In certain crucial respects, these organizations' position statements on nontherapeutic circumcision are strikingly similar to that of the NYSVMS on cat declawing.

Then there is the reluctance of legislators to take on this issue for a variety of reasons, not least of which is their mistaken belief that a ban on non-therapeutic circumcision would violate the first amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion. Of course, numerous state legislatures have demonstrated no such qualms about banning female genital cutting for religious reasons. 

Added to this is the persistent cultural view of children as property. Many parents who support nontherapeutic penile circumcision claim that, because their children belong to them, they (the parents) have a right to cut off part of their children's genitals.  This, too, mirrors the view of people who regard companion animals as property, to do with whatever they choose.

Finally, the genital autonomy movement has had to contend with the deep-seated conviction of those who endorse nontherapeutic circumcision that this is not something that one does to a child but for a child.  Those who practice genital cutting of any type - whether of boys, girls or intersex children - sincerely believe that the genital surgery to which they are subjecting their child will benefit that child.  At the very least, they regard it as harmless.  Even when this blithe fantasy collides with the reality that any surgery is traumatic for an infant - especially one performed on one of the most sensitive parts of the body (and, typically, with insufficient or even no anesthetization) - still such parents reason with themselves that, in any event, "the benefits outweigh the risks" ("risks" serving, in this case, as a conceptual stand-in for "harms").  Those who opt to have their sons circumcised thus make a moral calculation that the overall good that results outweighs the potential and even the actual harms of the surgery itself.

Similarly, those who defend cat declawing do so on the principle that it produces an overall good when the alternative is abandonment or euthanasia. These cat-lovers likewise have made a moral calculation that the overall good that results from having their cats declawed outweighs the actual harms of declawing.

In both of these cases, however, it is not the person exercising this surgical option who must live with the consequences of the surgery but the cat or the human infant - and, of course, the man that that infant will one day become, since circumcision is irreversible.  Still, it must be acknowledged that parents who impose their own penile preferences on their sons' bodies are not evil, sadistic monsters who want to harm their sons.  These are parents who love their sons but who, for one reason or another, believe nontherapeutic circumcision to be beneficial, appropriate and ethical.  This is no less true, by the way, of parents who subject their daughters to what is known in our culture as female genital mutilation (FGM).  The parents in these cultures love their daughters just as much as we love our sons.  And when they choose genital cutting for their daughters, they do not do so out of malice, nor do they regard it as "mutilation."  They regard it as beneficial, as something religiously mandated and as something culturally meaningful.  Above all, like parents in our society, they regard it as their right to make this decision on behalf of their daughters.

If the similarities between cat-declawing and non-therapeutic penile circumcision were not  plain enough,  a statement by one of the New York bill's sponsors, Assemblymember Linda B. Rosenthal, which she made when she first introduced her legislation, underscores the point:

There's no reason to do it unless the animal has [an] infection that is never going away, or if there is a cancer or tumor-related issue in the claw.   It's basically done because humans want it done, and I don't think it's our right to mutilate our animals for our own satisfaction.

Exactly the same can be said of nontherapeutic penile circumcision:

There's no reason to do it unless the infant has an infection that is never going away, or if there is a cancer or tumor-related issue in the prepuce.  It's basically done because humans want it done, and I don't think it's our right to mutilate our sons for our own satisfaction. 

All of which leads me to wonder how, in passing these anti-cat-declawing laws, these legislators can exude such compassion, empathy and respect for the bodily integrity of cats while remaining perfectly devoid of any comparable sentiments when it comes to the bodily integrity of human males.  After all, don't we deserve to have the same rights as cats?

Update: Maryland Governor Larry Hogan signed the legislation banning cat-declawing in April of 2022 making Maryland the second state to ban this inhumane practice.   As of now, however, there is no pending legislation in Maryland that would provide children with penises with the same legal protection for their genitals that Maryland now provides for cats' claws.

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David Balashinsky is originally from New York City and now lives near the Finger Lakes region of New York. He is a licensed physical therapist and writes about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, politics, and sometimes cats.  He currently serves on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.
 

 

 

Democracy vs. Kyrsten Sinema

by David Balashinsky

Back in January, when the world was a very different place, Kyrsten Sinema delivered a speech on the Senate floor explaining her refusal to vote to eliminate the filibuster.  Because  two critical pieces of legislation, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, lack enough votes in the Senate to pass by the 60-vote threshold, eliminating the filibuster, which the Democrats could do on a simple majority vote, is the only way that these bills can pass in the senate and eventually become law.

Everything that need be said about Sinema on this topic already has been said.  In particular, I strongly recommend Michelle Goldberg's Opinion piece in the Times, "Sinema and Manchin's Nihilistic Bipartisanship."  Even more to the point, the Replace Sinema Project has issued its own rebuttal to the assorted errors, outright falsehoods and absurd rationalizations that comprise Sinema's stated objections to filibuster reform.  Notwithstanding, I found it impossible to read a transcript of Sinema's speech without giving vent to my own reactions to it.  First, though, some thoughts on the filibuster, itself.

There are as many good reasons to eliminate the filibuster as there are reasons why it is bad.  My view is that the Senate filibuster, in its current form, is simply anti-democratic because it obstructs the will of the majority.  (Of course, the composition of the senate is, itself, anti-democratic, but that's another matter.)  

Supporters of the filibuster often try to defend it on the grounds that it prevents "the tyranny of the majority."  It may be time to retire that argument.  So long as the fundamental, constitutional rights of every person are guaranteed, majority rule by voting is not a form of tyranny but of fairness.  It is the most reasonable solution for determining a course of action among more than two people.  Majority rule is so inherently natural that most of us wouldn't even consider anything else.  Who hasn't had the experience of having to make a collective decision about something - where to order take-out for the office party, or where to rent the airbnb for the family reunion - and deciding the question by putting it to a vote?  When a simple majority - even by one vote - carries the day, no one ever says, "That's not fair!  You need a margin of 20 percent to win!"  Imagine a sport like baseball in which, at the end of nine innings and with a score of six to five, the team with six doesn't win.  Rather, in order to prevent the "tyranny" of the victorious - that is, the better team or the one that had a better day, which would be very unsportsmanlike of it - one team would have to vanquish the other by a margin of at least 20% - say, six to four - in order to be declared the winner.  Such a scheme doesn't prevent one form of tyranny - it simply creates another.  It gives one side - in politics, the less popular side - proportionally greater power to determine an outcome and to establish public policy than the majority.  That's an even more unjust form of tyranny: a tyranny of the minority, which is exactly what we now have in the Senate.  

The 60-vote threshold to pass legislation simply negates the power of the majority.  That doesn't foster compromise or civility.  It does the opposite.  It undermines the morale of the majority by proving that their votes don't matter.  It undermines democracy itself by discouraging citizens from participating and voting - why bother? - rendering Americans embittered and cynical.  Currently and in practice, it enables the Republican Party, which represents a minority of the electorate, to obstruct the will of the majority that wants to see their representatives do what it elected them to do (including passing the two voter-protection laws that have been stuck in the Senate).  That's not my idea of democracy and I do not think that it was the founders' idea of democracy either, which is probably why the filibuster is nowhere to be found in the constitution.  (Not that the constitution, as originally drafted, is so democratic either, but that's also another matter.)

In the real-world context of the Republican strategy to disenfranchise as many non-White and non-Republican voters as possible, the battle is not between Republicans and Democrats but between Republicans and Democracy.  The Party of Trump has demonstrated time and again that it will stop at nothing to seize political power by any means, fair or foul, legal or illegal.  Refusing to lift a finger to oppose the Trumpist agenda of ending democracy is not a repudiation of partisanship, as Sinema would have us believe,  but a unilateral surrender to it.  The ground-rules of democracy itself - how elections are held, who gets to vote and whose votes get counted - are being subverted in such a way as to entrench, likely for generations, minoritarian rule by the Republican Party in the United States at both the state and federal levels and in all three branches of government.  

In this dark reality, it seems almost too good to be true that the Independents and Democrats in the Senate should have just enough votes to eke out a legislative victory that might very well be the last, best hope of preserving democracy in our nation.  Well, it turns out that it is too good to be true, thanks in large part to Kyrsten Sinema.  That is what makes her refusal to vote to do away with the filibuster so galling.  She actually has the power, right now, to prevent what may ultimately prove to be an irrevocable Republican subversion of democracy but refuses to exercise it.  

Sinema, of course, is not the only nominal Democrat thwarting the will of the Democratic Party and of the American voters.  The other one is the coal magnate and multi-millionaire Joe Manchin.  Manchin is as responsible for the unilateral surrender to the Republicans as Sinema is but I am focusing here on her partly because I had much higher hopes for her but, also, because, as I have mentioned already, having read Sinema's speech, I simply cannot allow to go unchallenged the naive and specious arguments with which Sinema attempts to justify her refusal to vote to get rid of the filibuster.  What follows, then, is a semi-annotated rebuttal to her speech, excerpts of which appear in italicized block quotations. 

It is more likely today that we look at other Americans who have different views and see the “other,” or even see them as enemies – instead of as fellow countrymen and women who share our core values.

In this statement, as she does throughout her speech, Sinema treats the partisan estrangement between Republicans and Democrats as reciprocal and equal, as though the views of both are  equidistant from the center.  This is a false equivalence.  For years, Republican strategists, politicians and right-wing hate mongers on Fox and other like-minded media platforms have been vilifying, demonizing and deliberately misrepresenting the views of Democrats and Independents in ways unlike anything that emanates from the center or the left.  Republicans  disparage Democrats as internal enemies of the United States and as a threat to our very way of life.  In fact, the idea that our nation and our way of life are under attack is now the predominant theme of White-nationalist, Republican and Trumpist discourse.  This has been building for years, as Ronald Brownstein explains:

Late in the 2016 presidential campaign . . . Michael Anton, a conservative scholar who later joined the Trump White House, described the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the "Flight 93 Election." . . .  Anton insisted that a Democratic victory would change America so irrevocably that conservatives needed to think of themselves as the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11 - the ones who chose to bring down the plane to save the U.S. Capitol from al-Qaeda hijackers.  Letting the Democrats win, in other words, would doom the country. . . .

For at least the past decade, GOP candidates and conservative-media personalities have routinely deployed rhetoric similar to the Flight 93 argument.  Only about 40 hours before the [January 6] insurrection, at a campaign rally hosting an enthusiastic, virtually all-white audience in rural Georgia, President Trump insisted that if Democrats won the state's two Senate runoff elections . . . "America as you know it will be over, and it will never - I believe - be able to come back again."

And, of course, on January 6th, 2021, while inciting his mob before it assaulted the capitol in order to prevent the certification of Biden's electoral victory, Trump declaimed "We fight like hell.   And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

In his speech accepting the Republican Party's nomination for him to run for president again in 2020, Trump declared "this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we will allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it."

As CNN reported last year, the day before leaving office, former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo tweeted, "Wokism, multiculturalism, all the -isms - they're not who America is.  They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. . . ."  In the same story, CNN notes that in remarks he delivered the previous July,

Pompeo fanned the flames of division stoked by Trump, warning that "the very core of what it means to be an American, indeed the American way of life itself, is under attack" amid nationwide protests for racial justice and against police brutality.

Writing in Vox, Zack Beauchamp drew essentially the same conclusions as Brownstein, namely, that "The Capitol Hill mob was the logical culmination of years of mainstream Republican politics."

The animating force of modern Republicanism is this: Democratic Party rule is an existential threat to America and is by definition illegitimate. . . .

Whether elite Republicans genuinely believe what they tell their base is beside the point.  The fact is their delegitimizing rhetoric has been the fuel of the conservative movement for many, many years now.

Beauchamp noted that, on the morning of January 6th, 2021 Lauren Boebert, a Republican representative from Colorado, "tweeted that the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results amounted to a new American revolution.  'Today is 1776,' she wrote."  Ten years earlier, Sharon Angle (a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate) had stated in an interview "that she believed that Americans might need to take up arms against the tyranny of Barack Obama and the Democratic congress."

Writing for the New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser pointed out that

In one alarming survey released this week, nearly thirty percent of Republicans endorsed the idea that the country is so far "off track" that "American patriots may have to resort to violence" against their political opponents.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat reported in the Washington Post that 

In June, an anchor of One America News suggested that execution might be an apt punishment for the "tens of thousands" of "traitors" who, he claimed, stole the election from former president Donald Trump.  A sitting member of congress, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Americans in May that they "have an obligation to use" the Second Amendment, which is not about recreation but "the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government if that becomes necessary."

. . . 

This Republican culture of violence and threat builds on histories of racial persecution and on policing used as an instrument of terror against non-Whites.  Habituation to such violence, reinforced by the presentation of non-Whites as an existential threat to the future of America (as in the "great replacement theory" that Tucker Carlson has referenced on Fox News) makes it easier for the public to accept violence around political events, like elections, as necessary to "save the country."  Tellingly, the participants in the January coup attempt, which was billed as just this kind of patriotic act, included 57 local and state GOP officials. . . .

Only last month, the Republican National Committee officially labeled the attempted coup against our government on January 6, 2021 as "legitimate political discourse."

Clearly, it's long past time to acknowledge that, while the majority of Americans who identify as Republicans may, indeed, be "fellow countrymen and women," they do not, in fact, "share our core values," as Sinema insists on giving them credit for doing.  Our core values include respect for free and fair elections.  They include respecting the results of free and fair elections.  They include respect for the peaceful transfer of power from one presidential administration to the next.  Our core values also include honesty, decency, integrity, fairness, equality, belief in facts and belief in science: the diametric opposite, in other words, of everything that Trump and his cult of followers represent.  So, no, the majority of Americans do not share core values with Trump's base and the Republican Party in its current incarnation.

It’s more common today to demonize someone who thinks differently than us, rather than to seek to understand their views.

Ah, but we do understand the views of Republicans, only too well.  Sixty-eight percent of them believe the 2020 election was stolen.  Forty percent of them believe that "political violence is justifiable and could be necessary" in the near future.

Our country’s divisions have now fueled efforts in several states that will make it more difficult for Americans to vote and undermine faith that all Americans should have in our elections and our democracy.  These state laws have no place in a nation whose government is formed by free, fair, and open elections.

That is precisely why the filibuster needs to be eliminated: so that the two voting-reform bills that are stuck in the Senate can be passed on a simple majority vote.  These bills would prevent or undo the damage to our democracy that these anti-democratic state laws would otherwise do, potentially, for the foreseeable future.  Sinema, herself, acknowledges that "These state laws have no place" in our nation.  Yet her response to these coordinated assaults on our democratic system of government is simply to surrender and to declare her surrender before the entire Senate. 

Threats to American democracy are real.

Yes, they are, and they require real responses, not hand-wringing speeches justifying doing nothing to oppose these threats to American democracy.

Our politics reflect and exacerbate these divisions. . . .

That is absolutely true.  And one of the most powerfully destructive ways that our politics exacerbates these divisions is through the mechanism of extreme partisan gerrymandering.  When a congressional district is drawn in such a way that a candidate can completely ignore the views of the minority within that district, the only real competition she or he is likely to face is during the primaries from ever more extreme fringes of her or his own party.   That is exactly how political gerrymandering promotes extremism and, inevitably, the very divisions that Sinema claims to want to repair.  Political gerrymandering is one of the structural flaws in our electoral system,  so toxic to our politics and to our society, that the Freedom to Vote Act would remedy.  If Sinema really wants to bridge political divisions and restore bipartisanship to our politics, she should be doing everything in her power to ensure passage of the Freedom to Vote Act - not forestalling any possibility of its passage by blocking filibuster reform.  

These bills help treat the symptoms of the disease [which, according to Sinema, is our nation's political polarization, or "division"] – but they do not fully address the disease itself.

That is both a misreading and a misstatement of the crisis of democracy in America today.  The disease is not "division": the fact that people disagree politically or on specific policies.  Rather, the disease is that one major political party is, at this moment, rewriting election law so as to give an insurmountable structural advantage to Republican Party candidates while disenfranchising millions of Americans.  That's the disease.  

It's not difficult to understand why the Republican Party no longer believes in democracy.  Its strategists and leaders grasp only too well that the Republican Party represents the views and interests of a minority of citizens in this country; it knows that changes in demographics as well as the ongoing, broad liberalization of our society's views of race, gender, equality and abortion rights make the Republican Party appealing to an ever-shrinking share of the electorate; and it knows that, for all these reasons, the only way Republicans can win elections in much of the country - and in the electoral college - is by preventing the "free, fair and open elections" that Sinema claims to support but which, by her refusal to do away with the filibuster, she has, in fact, chosen to allow the Republicans to prevent. 

"Division," in and of itself, is neither dysfunctional nor pathological.  Republicans have every right to disagree with Democrats and they have every right to try to convince voters that their vision for America is one Americans ought to support at the ballot box.  That's how democracy is supposed to work.  Indeed, disagreement can even be healthy for a democracy.  But when one party no longer is willing to abide by the foundational ground rules of democracy, that is when democracy itself can be understood to be "diseased."

[E]liminating the 60-vote threshold will simply guarantee that we lose a critical tool that we need to safeguard our democracy from threats in the years to come.

What Sinema doesn't seem to grasp is that eliminating the Senate filibuster is virtually the only tool that we have left to safeguard our democracy right now.  Sure, it would be nice if things had not gotten to this point.  But here we are.  We can either recognize that our democracy is on the precipice and prevent its irrevocable descent into the abyss, or we can do what Sinema has chosen to do: nothing.

Our mandate . . . [i]t seems evident to me [is] work together and get stuff done for America. 

In a two-party system, that approach only works when both parties agree to abide by it.  Unfortunately, ever since the Obama administration, the Republican Party has stuck tenaciously to a policy of rigid and relentless obstructionism.  The Republican leader of the senators in Sinema's own legislative body, Mitch McConnell, said it himself back in 2010: "our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office."  He reaffirmed the Republican policy of refusing "to work together and get stuff done for America" once Biden was in office, declaring that  "one hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration."  In 2020, McConnell boasted about killing close to 400 separate pieces of legislation that had passed the House of Representatives, many with bipartisan support.  Clearly, working "together to get stuff done" is diametrically opposite the Republican Party leadership's political strategy.  (And when some Republicans have demonstrated bipartisanship - not as an end in itself but simply because they were voting in the best interests of their own constituents - they have received death threats, apparently, from Republican voters.)   

We must commit to a long-term approach as serious as the problems we seek to solve – one that prioritizes listening and understanding. One that embraces making progress on shared priorities, and finding common ground on issues where we hold differing and diverse views.

How does one find common ground with people who believe that the Democratic Party represents a global cabal of pedophiles?  How does one find common ground with people who believe that Obama is not a native-born American and a Christian but a foreign-born crypto-Muslim who is hostile to our nation's interests?  How does one find common ground with people who believe that Sandy Hook and Covid19 are hoaxes created by nefarious forces, including our own government, for the purpose of depriving Americans of their civil liberties?  How does one find common ground with people who claim, against all evidence, that Biden didn't win the election?  How does one find common ground with members of a political party that, collectively, refuses to repudiate Trump and refuses to repudiate Trump's lies and his attempts to destroy our constitutional system of government?  How does one find common ground with people who consider the insurrectionists who attempted the overthrow of our constitutional order on January 6th "patriots" and who regard those now charged for their participation in that shocking assault on our nation as "political prisoners"?  More to the point, should we attempt to find common ground with such people?  Isn't it more the case that reaching out a hand to them, searching for common ground and trying to "understand" them merely validates them and confers upon them a political and a moral legitimacy that they do not deserve? 

So I find this question answers itself:

Can two Americans of sharp intellect and good faith reach different conclusions to the same question?

Yes. Yes, of course they can.

Except that Donald Trump has neither a sharp intellect nor is he acting in good faith - quite the reverse.  So, indeed, that question does answer itself because the Republican Party is not what it was in the 1960s.  It is now the Party of Trump.  And if its spiritual and de facto leader is not acting in good faith, the party that supports, legitimizes and empowers Trump cannot - must not - be assumed to be acting in good faith, either.

Some have given up on the goal of easing our divisions and uniting Americans. I have not.

That's commendable.  But there's a principle in emergency medicine that applies to our political crisis: First, stabilize the patient.  The long-term objective of restoring civility and bipartisanship to our politics and our government is laudable.  But a long-term strategy of recovery and reclamation is not an appropriate response in an emergency.  That is the critical difference here.  Sinema does not seem to recognize that we are in uncharted territory: a break-the-glass moment in our nation's history in which Republican subversion of the ground rules of our democracy, unless prevented by passage of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, will be entrenched likely for decades, possibly for generations.  That can only be prevented by first eliminating the Senate filibuster so that these two voter-protection bills can pass by the simple majorities that already support them.

Nothing less than democracy, itself, is at stake now.  History will record that Sinema had the power to save democracy in the United States before it let out its last gasp and she refused to do so.

Update - 9 December 2022:  Sinema has now announced her intention to leave the Democratic Party.  In her statement explaining this decision, she refers to "the edges" of the Democratic and Republican parties and cites "the loudest, most extreme voices" within those parties as though both sides are equally to blame for the vitriol, partisanship and outright assaults on our democracy that are making our system of self-government dysfunctional.  This is just one more example of Sinema's attempting to distract from and to justify her betrayal of those who helped put her in office by creating a false equivalence between the Republican and Democratic parties.  To be clear, it was not a mob of Democratic Party supporters that invaded the capitol and attempted to stage a violent coup preventing the legitimate transfer of power from one presidential administration to the next.  And it was not Biden but Trump - the de facto head of the Republican Party - who, only this week called for the suspension of the United States constitution.

Update - 11 Deceber 2022: Additionally, because Sinema is now no longer a Democrat, the Primary Sinema Project has now changed its name to the Replace Sinema Project.  I have edited this column to reflect that name change.

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David Balashinsky is originally from New York City and now lives near the Finger Lakes region of New York.  He writes about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.  He currently serves on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.