Ron Low http://www.jta.org/user/profile/63844 en-us zsilberman@washingtonjewishweek.com Copyright 2012 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 7000 signatures is chicken scratch. This WILL make it to the ballot and it WILL pass. The time to get worried about intactivism was 14 years ago when the FGM law was passed. Oh, but that only affected a Muslim tradition. bzzzzzzzzzzzzt. Too late. Better luck next time. In the US and Israel 3% of good Jews do not circumcise. Cutting him at birth takes away HIS religious freedom to be THAT kind of good Jew. Including a religious exemption in the ban would never pass constitutional muster. You can't FAIL to protect someone from harm just because of his parents' faith. Just ask a JW, LDS, Christian Scientist, Snake Handler, or Muslim. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I'm frankly suprised that this story made no mention of the Gates foundation spending 10s of millions of dollars to circumcise Africans. This is anti-philanthropy and will have a profound toll. Men are lining up for circumcision thinking it will make them immune to HIV. Meanwhile in August it was announced that African researchers determined HIV+ men were 50% MORE likely to transmit the virus after circumcision. Most of the US men who have died of AIDS were circumcised at birth. 80% of US adults are circumcised yet we have an HIV incidence three times as high as Europe's even though circumcising is rare in Europe. Several non-circumcising nations have AIDS rates lower than 95%-cut Israel's. Clearly partial genital amputations are neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid AIDS. Gates should be buying condoms, not circumcision tools. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 It's a silly lawsuit. Claiming someone has an intact normal body carries no monetary damages. He's suing for ^^ severe embarrassment, mental anguish and extreme emotional distress ^^ but the only person who should be embarrassed is the one who cut his genitals when he was an infant. The foreskin includes over half a male's specialized pleasure-receptive nerve endings, and 100 square centimeters of exquisite adult sensual interface. Nobody has the moral right to cause non-therapeutic amputations from someone else's body without consent. Thou shall not steal has superceded the covenant of the 8th day. HIS body HIS decision. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Somebody tell these doctors that condoms are 95 times more cost-effective than circumcision at fighting AIDS (even assuming the 3 large Africa "controlled" trials are plausible, which they aren't). In Cameroon, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, and Tanzania, it is the circumcised who have markedly higher HIV incidence. In the US, most of the half-million US men who have died of AIDS were circumcsied at birth. Foreskin feels REALLY good. It's unreal what circumcised people will do to perpuate the practice rather than face the fact that they were harmed. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00