Global war on wo/men, through children!

Global war on wo/men, through children!

By Van Lewis

Ralph Peters got it half right (see below): "The greatest social revolution in history is underway all around us: The emancipation of" human beings. Humans have been and are being oppressed, not just women. We are all in the process of throwing off this inhuman oppression.

Peters points out rightly that it is not just men who oppress women. Women oppress women, too, and he gives the most horrifying and undeniable example possible, female genital mutilation of young girls by "old crones" in Africa, the sexual violence and war by adult women against their own daughters and granddaughters.

It is important for U.S. Americans to understand that this same evil war against the young and their future is being waged here in our own country by "old trolls" against young boys. Develop the human decency to call it what it is: male genital mutilation.

And not just here. We in the USA are only the second most numerous group in the world committing these heinous sex crimes against male children. By far the largest group is the Islamic world, against the anti-female sexism of which Mr. Peters writes so trenchantly. He has missed the anti-male sexism in those societies completely, perhaps because it is so powerful and all-pervasive in his own.

Jews, although relatively small in number, are the lynchpin in the ongoing justification for this ancient madness, having the specious "authority" of antiquity on their side. Both Islam and the Americans look to the Jewish myths and justifications to underpin and maintain our own insanities on the subject.

Genitally mutilating cultures are intensely self-justifying in their gross criminality against the young. Every conceivable ploy is used, from "God" to "religion" to "medicine" to "culture" to "aesthetics" to "social conformity" to "sexual control" on down, to keep the masses cowed and compliant, whether the sexual mutilations are committed against females, males, intersexed children, or all children regardless of sex.

For Americans, even the horrifying deaths of babies from circumcision cannot stop the slaughter of the innocents, which we regard as normal, so long as the babies dying are exclusively male (or intersexed). Female minors' genitals in our society are literally untouchable. Congress passed the federal anti-female genital mutilation act in 1996 and protected female minors' sex organs from even the slightest pin-prick, effective 30 March 1997. Looking at a young girl's sex organs wrong is now a federal felony.

As it should be. The law, although obviously unconstitutionally sexually and religiously discriminatory, is otherwise laudable. Its protections, to pass constitutional muster, must simply be extended to include all minors regardless of sex, religion or any other factor. What sex the child happens to be, what the religion or culture of the parents is, all of this is 100% irrelevant. The question is, when will ALL children in the world enjoy equal protection, legal and social, for the physical integrity of their own bodies that presently is extended only to a relatively few especially privileged ones?

The level of ignorance in our world about the actual nature, the structures and functions, of the human sex organs is astounding. It was only in the 1990s, for example, that science discovered a major, complex, highly evolved human sense organ within the human male foreskin. This "sexual eye" contains the highest density of nerve endings yet discovered in the human penis. Named by its discoverers the "ridged band", it is the exact target of male genital mutilation. You can read its uncontroverted scientific neuroanatomy in the British Journal of Urology of 1996 and 1999. The original articles are available through links at http://research.cirp.org

We genitally mutilated men – primarily Muslims, U.S. Americans, Africans and Jews – are sexually blinding our male children for life. As a direct consequence of our mutilations, we are afflicted with the sexual blindness necessary to wonder what the problem is with our misogynistic, raging, rampaging, warring, self-destructive, genitally mutilated, genitally mutilating cultures.

Male sexual butchery isn't just an oppressive attack on males and our sexuality, either. It is equally an attack on females and their sexuality. You cannot harm one sex without harming the other.

If you wanted to harm a woman grievously, without touching her body, how could you do it?

One of the most diabolical ways I can imagine is to mutilate deliberately and for life the sex organ of the man she most deeply loves.

Expand your evil, woman-hating plan. Don't just pick on one unlucky woman. Exercise your misogyny mightily. Go after ALL women. Mutilate the penis of every boy born.

Voila: Most of Islam, the USA, Africa, Israel.

Human liberation will never succeed as long as adults on this planet attack and mutilate the sex organs of their own children. These very sick people are the ones who rule Islam, the USA, Israel and most of Africa. They don't even know enough not to butcher the healthy sex organs of their own children. The human revolution will not succeed before this, the grossest form of child sexual abuse, is ended worldwide.

Adults must be stopped from harming children's sex organs no matter what it takes to restrain them from inflicting their compulsive, anti-sexual insanity on innocent children's healthy bodies. If we cannot insure even this minimum level of physical protection to the children of the world, then this world is condemned to sexual and broader violence from now on, for genital mutilation of children by adults is the most evil form of violence in the world. It is war against the young, war against the future by the old crones and old trolls – what sex they happen to be is irrelevant, too – who are terrified by the mortal fear that they will die, and wracked with the intolerable envy that young people will go on living, and what's worse, will have more pleasure and happiness in life than they did themselves. But increasing the healthy pleasure – including the potential for healthy, whole sexual pleasure in adulthood – and the broader happiness, health and security of the young is the only way to peace on earth.

It is the clear responsibility of Earth's adults to end the genital mutilation of children on our planet. Let us not fail the children of our world, the future of humanity.

Van Lewis is the Administrator of the Ashley Montagu Resolution to End the Genital Mutilation of Children Worldwide: A Petition to the World Court, the Hague, which can be read and signed with Nobel Laureates and thousands of others at http://MontaguNoCircPetition.org


http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-09-26-women-edit_x.htm
http://tinyurl.com/9u8ng

Global war on women
By Ralph Peters
The greatest social revolution in history is underway all around us: The emancipation of women. Advanced in our own society, elsewhere the battle for women's rights lies at the heart of colossal struggles over the future of great religions and civilizations.
The Washington establishment would shrink from any such claim, but the Global War on Terror is a fight over the social, economic and cultural roles of women. The core issues for the terrorists are the interpretation of God's will and the continued oppression of women. Nothing so threatens Islamic extremists as the freedom Western women enjoy.
Equal partners
The sudden transition of women from men's property to men's partners in our own country unleashed dazzling creative energies. In the historical blink of an eye, we doubled our effective human capital - and made our society immeasurably more humane. Our half-century of stunning economic growth has many roots, but none goes deeper than the expansion of opportunities for women.
But such unprecedented freedom threatens traditional societies. Behavior patterns that prevailed for millennia are suddenly in doubt. Relationships that granted males the power of life and death over female relatives have disappeared from successful cultures. Defensively, the failing cultures left behind cling harder than ever to the old ways amid the tumult of global change.
The true symbols of the War on Terror are the Islamic veil and the two-piece woman's business suit.
The math is basic. No civilization that excludes half its population from full participation in society and the economy can compete with the United States and its key allies. Yet Middle Eastern societies, especially, have dug in their heels to resist change. Some, such as Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, have tumbled backward.
Islamist terrorists have formed the last, great boy's club, meeting in caves and warning girls to stay out - or, in the case of the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, demanding that women be kept from his grave to avoid polluting it. Their vision offers women fewer rights by far than those enjoyed by the wives of the prophet Mohammed. They are women-hating sadists for whom faith is an excuse. Their fears are primal.
The good news is that the forces of oppression can make plenty of tactical mischief but can't achieve strategic success. No society in which women are veiled and sequestered can achieve the dynamism and force of one in which women are senators, judges, CEOs, doctors and military pilots. Freedom will win, if not swiftly.
The bad news is that this is a truly global struggle involving not only Islamist thugs terrified by female sexuality, but also reactionary forces in our own society. The Global War Against Women is still being waged on the home front, too.
Without questioning the integrity of those who believe that life begins at conception, the struggle to overturn Roe v. Wade can also be viewed as an attempt to turn back the clock on women's freedom. Opposing such a reversal isn't a matter of thinking abortion admirable, but of accepting the magnificent revolutionary principle that no man has a right to tell any woman what she can or cannot do with her body.
Attempts to interfere with another citizen's liberty are worthy of Osama bin Laden, not of Americans.
Likewise, the ideologically driven reluctance of the Food and Drug Administration to approve the "morning-after pill" for general use is a vestige of patriarchal tyranny that would please Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq. Longing to restore the tyrannical pattern that governed social relations down the ages, our extremists demand that women's options be restricted, that their bodies be treated as chattels of the state.
Women deny rights
Nor should we be surprised that women stand among those who would deny rights to other women. Their counterparts are the African crones who demand that young girls undergo genital mutilation just as they did, or the women of the Middle East who insist that wearing a chador protects them. They are the champions of the small morality of rules over the greater morality of freedom.
The greatest moral advance has been the attainment of basic human rights by women. It's also the most threatening development to those daunted by change, who cling to a mythologized past and fear the future - whether in a Saudi-funded madrassa or protesting outside a U.S. Planned Parenthood clinic. Around the world, troubled souls continue to insist that women are the source of sin and must be kept in line for their own good. Theirs is a prescription for suffering, dreariness and stagnation.
In traveling the globe, I've witnessed far more instances of the mistreatment of women than I care to recall, but the one that always leaps to mind is local and superficially benign: In the southern heat of a Washington summer, it's common to see a male Middle Eastern tourist comfortably dressed in a polo shirt and shorts trailed by a staggering woman wrapped from head to toe in flapping black robes, eyes peering out through a mask. It offends me to meet that image in my country - or anywhere.
We do not think of our troops abroad as fighting for women's rights. But they are. This is the titanic struggle of our time, the liberation of fully half of humanity. Islamist terror is only one aspect of it. But we can be certain of two things: In the end, freedom will win. And no society that torments women will succeed in the 21st century.
Ralph Peters is the author of New Glory, Expanding America's Global Supremacy, and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

000110 Sexual Peace: The Beginning and End of Human Genital Mutilations on Earth

The numbers preceeding the titles show the original dates of the writings, in YR/MO/DA order. 000110 means 2000 January 10. - VL

Sexual Peace

The Beginning and End
of Human Genital Mutilations on Earth

"...circumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever
and no place in a civilized society."

from MUTILATED HUMANITY:
An Anthropologist Looks at Circumcision and its Probable Origin
by Ashley Montagu, PhD.

"The most difficult question with which the anthropologist is confronted is the origin of any custom. The truth is that it is generally not possible to answer most questions relating to origins. All sorts of explanations have been offered for the origin of circumcision, and those speculations seem almost as numerous as the autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa. Studies of the cultures in which such mutilations are customary suggest that the underlying motivations for them, whatever their origins may have been, are very different from what the usual explanations have to offer. Since those motivations have been obscured by millennia of mythological, religious, ritualistic, and secular rationalizations, it is very unlikely that anyone, with the exception of an unprejudiced inquirer, can arrive at a reasonable explanation of their origins. ...

"... Hanny Lightfoot-Klein thinks it conceivable that female circumcision dates back 'to the early beginnings of mankind'. I think that unlikely, for the reason that early societies probably tended to be egalitarian and that male-dominator societies were a quite late development in human history. In egalitarian societies, such as most hunter-gatherer societies, female circumcision does not occur, and male circumcision is rare. This should provide a further clue to the deep origins of circumcision and to the probability that it was males who invented these mutilations. ..."

(Montagu quote completed at the end of this essay)

In writing to friends about human genital mutilations, I once said, "... humans, mammals, and other animals are made to be orgasmic."

One of them replied, "Not totally true. From what I understand, non-human male mammals reach a climax similar to that of human males, but they don't reach an orgasm to the extent of humans. There is no evidence of females of other species reaching an orgasm. The shared orgasm was developed in human ancestry to strengthen the pair bond. This is according to The Naked Ape."

I answered his comments above with my own doubts about science's knowledge of other species' sexual experience and/or lack thereof - including my speculations about the orgasms of sexually-reproducing plants (which no one seemed to want to discuss; the prudes! [short for prudent?]) - but let me take the other tack for the moment. Let's assume, as The Naked Ape reportedly claims, that humans are the only earthlings to experience shared male and female sexual orgasm.

Does this mean that mutual human sexual orgasm, more than tool-making, more even than the acquisition of language and wisdom, is the primary defining characteristic and ability of human beings? That we are not homo sapiens but, potentially at least, homo intactus sexualis orgasmus mutualis? (Or whatever the correct Latin words would be.)

"Other animals use tools and symbolic languages (to a lesser extent than we do, yes, but the differences are quantitative, not qualitative, aren't they?), but we are the sexiest creatures

G
e v o l u t i o n
d

(note the penile shape?)

or

E
v
G o d
l
u
t
i
o
n

(the cross?)

ever made, by far. We leave the other animals and all the dumb plants in the dust, sexual-experientially speaking. The quality of our sexual experience is so far beyond as to be altogether different from that of all other living beings. We are the greatest sexual creatures God's evolution ever made. (We are also the most modest and humble, of course. Aren't we great?!)"

If so, and if inhuman circumcision is an attack specifically upon human orgasm as distinguished from male ejaculation (as we had discussed earlier, and see Wilhelm Reich's "The Function of the Orgasm"), does this mean that circumcision, in it's origin and at its core, is an assault upon the most fundamentally defining and unique aspect of our humanity? Is it an attempt to reduce human beings to the personal, sexual, emotional, and social status, and to the "spiritual non-reality" of animals?

Is it really, then, in its actual effects on its victims if not always in the intentions of the circumcisers, the direct opposite of what its religious proponents claim?

This goes along with what seems to me to be the most consistently logical and deeply explanatory theory of the origin of circumcision as a mass phenomenon, and specifically of the origin of infant circumcision, that I've heard so far. If it does not get us all the way back to the very beginning of human genital mutilations on earth, it may take us back farther in that direction than we have gone before.

This theory says that broad-scale circumcision arose with early human agriculture in the middle east, 9,000 or more years ago. The trauma and lifetime sexual mutilation of circumcision were, according to this hypothesis, consciously employed there as attempts - successful ones - of early agricultural peoples to wreak terrible revenge upon - and at the same time to convert to economically beneficial agricultural use thereby - the hunter-gatherer tribes who for many millennia had had no non-hunter-gatherer human competition and who then were forced to compete strongly with the new and expanding agricultural cultures for available territory and food in a life-and-death struggle for the future nature of the then-and-there known world, human and otherwise.

Guess who won, and how: Us upstart farmers. And not by drawing straws with our hunter-gatherer competitors, either.

Human circumcision at the moment in human history when it became a mass phenomenon was one element - clearly the centerpiece - of an overall and successful attempt on the part of early agricultural peoples to make useful domesticated animals out of otherwise extremely dangerous and destructive, wild and free, garden-raiding, farm-field-wrecking, food-stealing, survival-threatening human beings, the hunter-gatherer tribes which, along with their ancestors, had had free-reign in the world since humans began.

The early farmers' motto? "If life gives you hunters-and-gatherers, make slaves."

What a "success" we dumb farmers made!

The limiting factor for early farmers wasn't land or water or sunlight or soil fertility. The whole fertile world was potentially their garden, as what's left of it is still ours. Once they had developed the beginnings of agriculture - the knowledge of what farming was all about, successful farming techniques, appropriate seeds and fields - their limiting factor very quickly became human labor.

"If only we had a little more help we could get this crop harvested and feed ourselves and our children this winter!" (I know the feeling. It is highly motivating.)

Early human agriculture badly needed domesticated animals for muscle power, so:

"Let's take our traditional (in)human enemies" (the farmer and the cowman have always had difficulty being friends, but they were best buddies compared to the farmer and the hunter-gatherer) "and, instead of killing these agricultural pests as we have been doing every time we've had the chance, let's make linguistically-gifted animal laborers out of them for our own benefit. It's called jujitsu, the art of using our opponent's own force against him, and in our favor.

"How do we dominate wild men and break their human spirit to this extent, and still have at least a chance of keeping them alive enough to do useful, heavy agricultural work for us? How do we make them do what we want them to? How do we make them serve us? How do we dominate and domesticate them? How do we make dumb farm animals out of them?

"It isn't that hard. We don't TELL them what to do. Not at first. We first SHOW them who's boss. We sexually humiliate and mutilate them. We cut off their penes. That'll get their attention. What could be easier or more obvious? And eventually - maybe pretty quickly - we will learn to sexually mutilate them in more clever ways that do not kill so many of them (What a waste! When they're dead, they're no good to us!), and that do not take away the reproductive capability of those who survive (What farmer wouldn't love to have comprehending, obedient, talking, self-operating, self-powered, self-repairing, automatic, self-REPRODUCING [That's thinking ahead!] farm tractors to order around? I'll take two dozen!), while still effectively reducing their orgasmic sexual pleasure and therefore their human family bonding and therefore family/social communicating and therefore tribal war making capability, while leaving them enough penis to still have something left to lose. Take just enough of the fight out of the man by taking the most pleasurable and exciting piece of instead of his whole penis. Leave him with something to think about.

"Boy! The guys who DO survive penectomy are REALLY mad! Having nothing left to lose, they come after us like there’s no tomorrow! The guys we circumcise, however, should get our message very clearly: 'Try anything foolish and we'll take the rest.' We can make these wild men - by-the-way and at-the-same-time and by-the-same-method - less sexually attractive - no, make that sexually REPULSIVE - to our own women by sexually mutilating them, not an inconsiderable side-benefit in itself, enabling us to ensure the permanent differentiation of our master/slave, human/"animal" populations in this area of the world where skin color offers no clue to master/slave status. We will cleverly and skillfully cut off what we and they know to be their most sexually-sensitive part, their prepuce instead of their entire penis. Those so marked are our slaves and can have no access to our women forever. And we can have all the access we want to theirs. We may find that this works just fine for our own survival purposes. Let's try it and see."

It did.

Aren't we smart, us dumb farmers? So this is how we won the early war between hunting-and-gathering and agriculture! No wonder circumcision is so deeply connected to our survival anxieties today. It was the most prominent horrific feature of life at the moment when we left the Garden of Eden. No wonder we circumcise our babies "anyway".

Cain slew Abel. And then he figured out he didn't have to kill him at all. He could just make him real scared, real sick, dominate him completely, and then use him for hard agricultural labor.

We call domesticated human agricultural animals "slaves". Inhuman slave holders throughout inhuman history have considered their human "property" to be less than human. (Are we all subhuman, PREhuman?) In the early middle east, slave owners tried to make their human slaves less than human - a different, lower species - through sexual mutilation and degradation of their specifically human orgasmic sexuality. They tried to deprive them of their human freedom, their fundamental humanity - and more or less succeeded, physically, through diabolically clever genital mutilations.

We have today the leftovers of this tragic transition in the middle east from its earlier egalitarian hunting-and-gathering cultures and economies to its later hierarchical, male-dominated, agricultural ones. We call these leftovers Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Not having anything more pleasurable to do, many sexually mutilated representatives of all these three closely-related monotheistic religious families are still cutting each other's throats and other private parts today, just as we have been doing for many centuries.

The Hebrew Old Testament prescribed circumcision, the Christian New Testament proscribed it, and the Islamic Quoran doesn't mention it.

Christianity is the only one of these three monotheistic religions originating in the middle east to have specifically rejected circumcision in its holy teachings, although most American Christians today are predominantly unaware of the implicit and explicit New Testament rejections - all the way back to and including Jesus - of genital mutilation of children and adults in favor of human wholeness. (See, for example, Titus 1:10-16, Acts 15:1-35, and John 7: 1-24. There are many other New Testament passages that make clear that the early Christian church, following Jesus, rejected as a "Jewish myth", in St. Paul's words, the idea that circumcision is required by God. I expand on this subject in my essay called "CHRISTIANITY and CIRCUMCISION: A Call to Christian Action", now available on the web at http://www.cirp.org/pages/cultural/lewis1.)

This ancient, massive, middle-eastern human trauma, tragedy, cataclysm, and catastrophe is, I think, the inhuman background out of which grew the circumcising cultures and religions of the peoples we know today as Jews, Christians (who historically have circumcised and still today circumcise in much smaller proportions than the other two), and Muslims. The proto-Hebrews were the hunter-gatherer victims of the new economic juggernaut of settled agriculture. They were the previously wild and free peoples captured, sexually mutilated, and enslaved by the newly ascendant, if less healthy and more violent, agricultural ones. The Egyptian-Hebrew agricultural master-slave relationship of the 1600s B.C. to 1200s B.C. recorded in the Old Testament is a much later version and a good example of this master-slave, genitally-mutilative, agriculturally-inspired pattern, which was begun much earlier in this brutalized and brutalizing part of the world.

After the initial traumatic assault and the subsequent establishment of a working agricultural slave economy, the captured peoples were taught and forced by their masters to commit this traumatic and mutilative circumcision sex crime against their own children generation after generation - "It's that or die with your woman and baby, Mr., make up your own mind." - and later still the circumcising peoples learned to continue to commit it against their own children on their own, even after their enemies had declined, retired, retreated, gone away, died out. And so it remains today.

What started as the inescapable violence of human warfare between fiercely competing, mutually exclusive cultures in the same physical territory and the concomitant sex crimes (inhuman sexual brutality, reminders of which we have seen again recently in Kosovo, as if we needed more) eventually became ritualized and revered in religion by the captured and sexually mutilated peoples.

"If we can't lick 'em, let's join 'em. We have to make this sexual, social, cultural catastrophe survivable somehow, anyhow. Let's take it out of the hands of our enemies by putting it into the hands of our God. Let's adopt it as our own if we have to, call it our religion if we have to, even call it God's will if we have to - we have no other explanation of why such a catastrophe should have happened to us, do we? - to survive it, to live and love another day."

I saw this development in microcosm in a Reuters news report in 1999 or 2000 about a young Somalian couple who, with their fellow villagers, took their two young daughters out of the village for their circumcision ceremony. After the cutting, those we call 'adults' retired to the village, leaving the girls tied to a tree in the sun with no water to "dry out" and stop bleeding. Then they heard the hyenas. They rushed back out to the tree and found one daughter missing an arm, and the other dead and half eaten.

The reporter later asked the parents for an explanation: "It must have been God's will.", they said. It is only a matter of time before this becomes, "This is God's will and command."

Here we can see in this one tiny, enormous family disaster how trauma and tragedy become religion and ritual, how catastrophe becomes culture: "It must have been God's will."

So said also the captured and brutally sexually mutilated peoples of the middle east 9,000 years ago to their children, who they had been forced to sexually mutilate with their own hands or watch be killed and then be killed themselves. The ones who resisted died. The ones who were mutilated chose "to live and love another day."

That day is today. The intactivist Jews of today are the ones leading the Jews and many of the rest of us out of our bondage to the old, archaic, mutilated sexual landscape back into the new - and very old - promised land of natural human sexual wholeness.

God always promises us a new and better land, but to get to it we have to cross the river Jordan. The first time the Jews were to cross Jordan, they succumbed again to genital mutilation, but the promised land into which they and we together now are going is a land of holy sexual wholeness and whole sexual holiness. When we only try to ford it, we find shallow and harmless the apparently raging river we are so afraid to cross intact. All we have to do to wade safely across into the promised land is to quit sexually mutilating our very own precious babies. I believe it is God's will that we do so.

Why should that be so difficult for us? Why can't we leave the horror that is our sexually mutilated history in the past where it belongs? Why must we try to make it, generation after mutilated human generation, millennium after tortured millennium, also our permanent destiny? It is not our home. We human beings were not born to live forever within the horrors of genital mutilation. Our home is in the long, long, peaceful past, and in the whole and holy infinite future, not the evil, relatively-recent, brief, war-mutilated terror. Let us make of the human future the good human future it is supposed to be. Let us let it be our home now, until the sun burns up.

Much sexual mutilation of agricultural slaves went on in the agricultural American south, too, despite the skin color marker, before and after institutionalized, legitimized slavery was abolished here only to be replaced by the economic and psychological slavery of our age.

In BEFORE HIS TIME, a book about Harry T. Moore - an almost forgotten early civil rights martyr in America who, together with his wife Harriette, was killed by a Klu Klux Klan bomb planted under their home in Mims, Florida, and exploded on Christmas night, 1951, (thanks, Ben Green, for telling us the Moores' important story) - there is on page 46 an eyewitness's description of the single most-publicized lynching in U.S. history. It occurred in Marianna, Florida, 90 miles west of my home town, in October, 1934, 8.5 years before I was born. Claude Neal, a black farm hand accused of raping, mutilating, and murdering a white woman, had the extreme misfortune to fall into the hands of a mob of angry whites:

"After taking the nigger to the woods...they cut off his penis. He was made to eat it. Then they cut off his testicles and made him eat them and say he liked it... "

Real American men are still supposed to eat it and say we like it:

"It didn't hurt us. We like it like this. We enjoy being severely traumatized as babies and sexually mutilated for life. If sex was any better we couldn't stand it." (Wink, wink.) "And our sons like it, too. They don't even feel the pain. Real men don't cry. Hell, our doctors could cut the whole thing off and it wouldn't slow US down one bit! Not the real men in MY family! Now, where are those damn women? Let me at 'em!" Whack!

So real men are sexually mutilated, can't cry about it (wonder why?), and we LIKE it?

I'm not convinced yet. Tell me again why it's to my advantage to take me from my mother's warmth, softness, protection, nourishment, and love at one day old or two, three, eight, 30, 60, 90, 180, 360, 720, 1440, 2880, traumatize my penis/brain and my formerly-human heart, steal the most sexually-sensitive organ of my body, sell it for cash to bioengineering companies which make additional dollars off of it bioengineering the dickens out of it and selling it again, give me none of the money, and leave me sexually dismembered, genitally unhung, emotionally traumatized, for life, and leave my poor clueless parents totally mystified as to why I grow up hating them and the whole god-damned world so much that at 19 I nearly murder them outright and at 26, when I find out why, I nearly murder the idiot doctor they employed to do their dirty work. Explain it to me again, please. Stupid as I am, I just don't get it. For what, exactly, was I subjected at three days old to the risks of total penectomy, castration, permanent inhuman insanity, deadly infection, and outright delayed or even immediate death? Re-mind me. I don't have one, apparently. Please, give me yours.

What happens in the second major human economic transition, from agriculture to industry? Is domestic animals what America's industrial barons, too, "knew" they needed us to be? Is that why, with the onset of our industrial economy in its take-over from agriculture, circumcision again arose and returned to the fore(skin)? Do genital mutilations come back into favor when cultures go into very stressful new periods of transitional economic and social history? Are males circumcised to make us discontented, hyper-vigilant agents of - or doltish, compliant slaves to use in dealing with - ("This is a free country, men! Choose your poison!") - the new, unknown, and frightening physical, economic, social, and psychological stressors?

In any case, just as institutional slavery in America was coming to an end, just after the beginning of the industrial revolution when mechanical/brain power would take over from muscle/brain power, we started trying again to make - of men! - domesticated animals through genital mutilations - (those in control in America over the last 130 years did) - industrial slaves this time instead of agricultural ones, yes, but compliant, cowed, fearful, whipped, controllable slaves all the same. We call them "Loyal, Solid Citizens. Good Workers." Animals. Domesticated, desexualized subhuman animals to labor forever in America's industrial economy for the benefit of America, the world's ugliest slave master, for "freedom" (whose?, her wealthy playboys'?), for no one at all. Death looks pretty good to me, compared to such barren, futile uselessness.

And now that we are transitioning again, into an information economy this time, what lies in store for the human penis?

Real, healthy, complete, natural human sexual pleasure, orgasm, satisfaction, gratification, fulfillment? Real human intimacy in it? Strength and happiness in physically, sexually, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually healthy human families?

"Outrageous! DANGEROUS!! No telling where those abominations would lead us! Without a little sex change operation on the new baby to insure sexual pleasure's mitigation in male and female, America never would have reached it's present glory, let alone its glory to come! WE are the light of the world! Our wonderful, pluperfect country is top-dog mutilator! WE are the chosen people! WE can show the whole world how to live! Move over, Jews! WE are the ones who now possess the Special Relationship with OUR God!"

(And aren't we oh-so-humble, too, in our self-proclaimed 'Christian' American holiness and self-righteousness? Our nauseating sanctimony is putrid inhuman illness.)

"It all starts with a proud commitment of our sons' and daughters' sex lives to the 'uplifting' of our 'Holy', 'Christian'," - (disgusting, sexually mutilative) - "society. Work like animals until you die so your children can do the same for the glory of America's wealthy and powerful industrialists turned cyber-rulers. We call it 'America the Beautiful'. Our mutilated penes are so much prettier, don't you think? 'My fellow Americans, Beautify America!', said Ladybird. 'Chop up your baby's penis today. Lyndon, pick up that unsightly prepuce.'"

Where in the world are imperialist America's subjected colonies now?

"Here we are. WE are they."

Where are white 'Christian' America's sexually-mutilated, subhuman slaves today?

"Here we are. Look at our penes. Our doctor-broken sex organs prove our permanent, indentured, enslaved, subhuman status beyond any shadow of a doubt."

On page 78 in BEFORE HIS TIME, Ben Green quotes the widow of Willis McCall, the sheriff who dogged Harry T. Moore, as saying:

"I don't think there is any question about it that the white race is a superior race to the black race. I believe that's a proven fact. In their native country, they're still eating each other. We don't do that."

Dear, sweet, gentle Mrs. white Willis McCall lied. We do. America eats her own children - starting as soon after birth as possible with the dismemberment of her male babies' penes, with the ritual devouring of our fore penes - to try to destroy our true human sexuality and humanity, to make out of all of us, men and women alike, industrial or cyber-slaves to America's vaunted, illusory "freedom", the greatest American lie. For most men and women, reality in America is a circular penile scar where true human sexual communication and sexual pleasure belong. For most Americans this evident scar is unseen, unknown even, but highly-valued all the same, we treasure the ABSENCE of the male prepuce, we TREASURE the mutilation of our penes, attesting undeniably to our (permanent?) enslavement to madness.

We Americans eat our own babies starting with their fore-penes to convert what is designed and intended to be a sacred, beautiful, graceful, treasured, holy, perhaps even lifetime sexual, emotional, economic, spiritual union and dance between two loving, fully human partners into an ugly, clumsy, very bad joke:

"Bill Clinton. Ha, ha."

Not funny.

"Break the sexual communication nerve lines and other penile equipment that make the unified human sexual dance possible, and by doing so make a shambles of the dance floor and fools of all the sexually-mutilated American slaves foolish enough to continue gyrating madly out of control on it."

Look around.

How do you think dance in America was converted from a graceful, harmonious, musical, shared activity of couples and groups of couples into the mass frenzy of frenetic, individualized, atomized, broken-down, spasmodic "noise dancers" we find today? (What? Am I loosing my love for rock-'n'-roll?! I must be getting old!)

Ask your doctor. Better yet, ask your neuroanatomist. (See www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/taylor/ and www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/cold-taylor to become literate on today's scientific human penile neuro-anatomy.) Your doctor is probably as clueless today as he was the day his American medical school taught him the only thing he probably still knows or ever learned about the human male prepuce - how to cut it off. If it's not even there, how can anyone ever learn anything about it? And isn't that the point? To be damn sure we never DO learn?

What you see today is only the tip of the iceberg of America's 130-year drive under the authority of criminal, blasphemous American medicine - (our doctors think they are greater than the God who designed and made us in His image) - to sexually mutilate her men, and through them, her women and children. The actual physical mutilation of billions of human sex organs and the human brains and human beings to which those organs are, then were, connected is the worst crime ever inflicted on the human race.

Circumcision stimulates terror, anger, rage, hatred and spasmodic frenzy in the infant being needlessly, senselessly assaulted, traumatized, and sexually mutilated for life. That is the irreducible inhuman fact. Circumcisers help us make angry, hate-filled men. Men, women and children pay the price. Male circumcision is the greatest catastrophe ever to befall America's women and children. His anger and hatred do not last just 30 seconds or a few minutes: That is the American circumcision myth in action, the great American circumcision lie. The terrified, hateful, raging emotions taught men through circumcision at birth last a lifetime. Read Ronald Goldman's books, CIRCUMCISION: The Hidden Trauma, and QUESTIONING CIRCUMCISION: A Jewish Perspective.

One underlying purpose (unconscious? deliberate? government-sponsored?) of all this mutilative madness is "national security", just as it was Joshua's purpose in circumcising the Moses- and desert-blessed, genitally intact Hebrews) when they crossed the Jordan into the promised land. (They had escaped from the circumcising agricultural Egyptians 40 years earlier and, under Moses leadership and blessing, they quit doing the Egyptians' genitally mutilative dirty work after they escaped, while they lived in the desert.) American national security advisors imagine they too can use the extreme anger and hatred generated for life by circumcision against those they decide are our enemies of the hour, of the moment. Men today are the only ones required to register for the draft. Sex discrimination in America? It is a felony to sexually mutilate a female minor in this country. Over a million male minors are sexually mutilated here every year, one every 26 seconds, cannon fodder for the American nightmare.

But our mutilating madness doesn't work out for us over the long haul. While we wait for our external enemies to show up, the pent-up anger and hatred generated by the lifetime trauma and mutilation of circumcision destroys marriages, innocent school-children - the whole integrity of the country, from the inside - through iatrogenic post-traumatic genital mutilation stress disorder.

Ever heard of domestic violence? Columbine? We have found the enemy and he is us - us circumcisees become circumcisers, and, occasionally, intellectually, morally, and ethically clueless, unseeing, but emotionally authentic American teen-age random killers.

Why do you think so many young men in America are - "out of the blue!", "inexplicably!" - killing their innocent classmates, teachers, and parents these days? Violent video games? Sex and violence in Hollywood movies? The obscenity that passes for American TV?

Bullshit. Their fundamental problem is not the sex and violence fantasies we feed their hungry brains in childhood and young adulthood. It is the obscenely sexually violent and permanently sexually and genitally mutilative reality we force-feed their body and brain as helpless infants. Their apparently "random" but entirely understandable violence (it's technical name is "post-traumatic stress disorder", in this case, "iatrogenic, post-traumatic, genital mutilation stress disorder") is only the result of their youthful ignorance (now rapidly being dispelled by the internet) and resulting poor targeting. These young mad men are only insane because they haven't yet confronted and targeted their real enemies - and can we blame them? - their own mutilated penes and the individual people - parents, doctors, and nurses - directly responsible for this lifetime, irreversible sexual, emotional, mental, and even spiritual catastrophe they have to carry around between their legs and ears 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year until they die, whether they ever learn anything about it or not. Some say the part "between their ears" even goes with them after they die: the mind, conscious and unconscious; the entire record of life in this universe from its beginning, one bloody trauma after another for untold eons.

But as the fateful little years go by in now mostly genitally mutilated America, as the anatomy of the human prepuce on the macroscopic, neurological, cellular, molecular, atomic and sub-atomic levels is scientifically explicated and as both the accurate gross and microscopic preputial anatomy and the scientific understanding of its nervous and other connections with the brain and the contributions of those seemingly infinitely complex preputial-penile nervous and other cellular and brain structures to healthy male and female human sexual functioning, pleasure, psychic experience and to resulting interpersonal relationships become known and as this deep knowledge of the birds and the bees on both business ends of both sexes' sexual genital-brain systems gets spread more and more broadly throughout the population, including the very large population of temporarily mystified but nevertheless legitimately enraged young men, white, black, and otherwise - America's circumcision rates reached up into the 90 percents in the 70s and 80s - you can bet your next paycheck and your sweet ass that some of these angry young men will improve both their targeting and their aim.

Sexual mutilation of innocent babies - for life - almost makes me think, even at what I had hoped would be a wiser 58 years, that it's ok to hate and kill if you target correctly and aim carefully - that it's proper and just. If I were a military planner for future generations - I am not - my number-one, top military target today would be today's living, active circumcisers. I would, from the safety of my guerrilla hideout, publicly announce and begin a vicious and effective underground retribution, revenge, circumciser-cleansing and reorientation campaign for the benefit of sexual mutilators and everyone else in America, the last stronghold of non-religious sexual mutilators in the world. My smart bombs would be targeted directly on them. They are the people I would kill. I still fear and hate them all, God forgive me, for they still have the power - and they use it once every 26 seconds in this mad country - to destroy the truly human future almost all humans seek.

I may not have a lot of time left in this life to accomplish something significantly beneficial for future humanity. I want to start killing circumcisers today please do not quote this sentence out of context. The violent "solution" has its appeal to the violated. Revenge is a very deep human motivation. You may doubt my word but I know all about it from personal experience.

America's grossly obscene sexual mutilation of babies - of human beings for life - tests my commitment to Christian non-violence like nothing else I have ever encountered. My individual story isn't over, folks. Chapter II is just beginning. It starts over again every morning, every nanosecond, every moment. (What is the smallest increment of time?) I'm a believer in Christian non-violence, yes, one of the relatively few, but I've never professed to be, and people in my life have never found me to be, and I do not expect in my lifetime ever to become a perfect practitioner of it. Don't look for perfection from me in this mutilated lifetime. I am not even a perfect idiot, although some have accused me of it. I am human. Or prehuman. Or subhuman.

But I do believe that if we want to end forever humanity's eons-old (but just a blink of time in all of human history) obsession with, investment in, and emotional dedication to inhuman sexual mutilations in all their hideous forms, we have to do it by understanding these hideous sex crimes completely - their biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, their religious and mythological and moral and ethical and legal connections and ramifications, their entire reality, including their executive personnel.

Infant circumcision is a grave emotional and mental illness in the circumciser, a highly contagious one, an extremely dangerous threat to the public health. Those who are sick with it need our help, but first, they must be stopped in their tracks. Their evil actions must be brought to a screeching halt. We have to outlaw these evil practices absolutely, not just for females, for all sexes, however many there may be. The Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act of 1995, which took effect on March 30, 1997, outlawing mutilation of the genitals of female minors in America is the most blatantly sexist and sexually discriminatory law we have enacted. Male and intersexed minors must be afforded absolutely equal protection. That is the law of the land. Read the constitution. The FGM law is nothing if not perfect, incontrovertible evidence of evil American sexism, a sexism that cuts both ways in different ways. It is not the law. The U.S. constitution is.

We have to learn to respect the physical and sexual nature - the constitution - of every child, and leave it intact and alone. It is his. It is hers. It is theirs, to give and receive as they may. Any unnecessary interference from us is sexual child abuse. Their genitals are not ours to manipulate and mutilate for ANY reason or none, at our whim. Nothing sacred in human life could be more obvious, and nothing sacred in human life is so routinely, unthinkingly, casually, happily, jokingly, even agonizedly, even reverently (any approach and attitude will do, who cares, so long as the baby gets sexually mutilated?) ruinously desecrated. Evil rules this world.

However much I and others may feel that they deserve it, I do not think that killing circumcisers will cut the mustard. They are primary resources of ours. We need them in this war for fundamental human rights until it's over. They are an increasingly-rare endangered species, living examples of our ancient enemy. We should treasure them more than we would any rare diamond. We need to preserve and study them. We need to understand them, all types of them, down to their very bone marrow and their very twisted brain matter, for they, too, more even than the innocent ones of us they mutilate, are the victims of these ancient, horrible, sick, and detestable sex crimes. Even worse and more deadly to the true human spirit than having it done to you is doing it to others.

I think, I hope, I believe with all my heart, that sexually mutilating babies and children is a dying profession, that sexual mutilators are a dying breed. But while they live, we need to learn very carefully and we need to very carefully document who and what they are. We do not need to kill any of them to win this war against blatant, public, anti-sexual, anti-life evil. In fact, we must NOT kill them if we really want to win, permanently. We need to examine all of them as carefully as we can and we need to make what we learn about them very, very public. Every high school student must some day know exactly what circumcisers are, and why they are. For that purpose if for no other we need to capture them alive, keep them alive as long as possible, treasure them, study them, hold them up to the light as we would rare gems, and show off all their facets, every ugly and beautiful one.

There is another very practical tactical reason we MUST not kill them. You never know who your allies are going to be in this war for sexual peace. Some of the most powerfully intelligent and effective intactivists in the world today are reformed sexual mutilators. Many are Jews. We are very fortunate that none of us killed them before they by some inexplicable miracle learned, repented and reformed. We need to do what the early farmers did; use our "enemies" against our Enemy, but not by mutilating and enslaving them this time; by freeing them from their own enslavement to inhuman sexual mutilation. Freeing them is an often supremely difficult but sometimes achievable task. First, we have to want to.

And there is yet another purpose to keeping them alive: Us. We are human. They cannot take our deepest humanity away from us with their knives (I say, without much scientific evidence for my rash, whistling-in-the-dark claim). We can only lose our true and deepest humanity to them, I say, if we take up knives and guns and bombs against them, for our true selves are deeper, I say, than our wounded flesh, our iatrogenic sexual perversions, our doctor-scrambled brains, our American-'medicine'-addled minds. We do not know ourselves in our true depth if we identify ourselves exclusively with and as our own mutilated bodies, brains, and psyches. We are - let us admit it, let us declare it, let us all become aware that we ARE - still - ourselves, the people who God made.

If there is actual good news in the New Testament, it has to be that the true expression and communication, here and now, with each other, of our deepest, holiest love for ourselves and for each other as God's sacred and perhaps even non-material children is NOT dependent upon the physical reality of our mutilated bodies and minds, nor even upon the physical reality of the oh-so-apparently-dominant physical world in which we brief humans briefly live. For we are not it. WE ARE US. All this other stuff isn't.

So, at any rate, this genitally, sexually, emotionally, psychically mutilated human intactivist hopes, senses, is.

If we can work together, we can win this war for humanity and sex and love that we did not choose, that was unexpectedly thrust upon us as mere babies by ignorant, victimized, brutalized, brutal, blatantly grossly sexually-abusive parents and doctors. They started this war against us, obviously. We didn't start it against them. To win it, my guess is that we will have to learn - even victimized, tortured and brutalized as we are - to love ourselves and each other very well if not perfectly, or, better yet, discover at last that we already do and always have, we men, women, intersexed, adults, children, infants, atheists, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, intacts, mutilateds, blacks, whites, reds, yellows, greens, and purples, intactivists all, some sweet day. Intactivism is a world-wide movement, and we have a world to win for the babies, the children, the future fully human beings of this planet. Let us now earn their gratitude.

Can we ever put down our knives and guns and bombs, our obscene Gomco clamps and plasti-bell devices, and really and simply love each other as we are? If so, we can win this ancient war. It is the old human war between love and fear. Which side are we on?

Do we have love enough, or can we make it, even for the oh-so-sick sexual mutilators amongst us? We mutilateds think WE'RE sick? It's hard to believe, I know, harder still to fathom, but the mutilators have made themselves even and FAR sicker by mutilating us than they made us with their perverted mutilations. Can we somehow find pity, compassion and love enough even for them? Does "winning" our "war" "against" them depend utterly upon our doing so? How, how shall we ever make peace with them, our true enemies since birth? How shall we make peace OF them? Of ourselves? Of us together?

If this world is ever to have peace and love, we all must become the love and peace of the world. It's up to us. And if we are going to do it, we mutilateds anyway have to do it carrying chopped up sex organs around with us everywhere we go until we die.

Make love, not war.

Can anybody show me how?


Van Lewis
P.O. Box 323
Panacea, Fl, 32346
VanLewis at post dot harvard dot edu

"The birthright of males - all males - to keep all of the
penis they are born with must therefore be secured by law."

John A. Erickson in "INFANT CIRCUMCISION: Crime Against Humanity"
http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org/crime.htm


Concluding the beginning quote by Dr. Ashley Montagu, Anthropologist,
from his essay "Mutilated Humanity"

"... compared to women and children, men have played a mutilating role, very much in the psychological as well as in the physical sense.

"In recent years, we have suddenly discovered that the abuse of children is rather more frequent than was generally believed. But with the exception of a few heroic people ... there have been very few activists to protest against circumcision, male or female. Today, now that child abuse has come to be recognized as a widespread psychopathy in America, it may be easier for people to perceive circumcision as a form of child abuse.

"This operative assault - whether shortly after birth or later - is obviously a highly traumatic experience for the child. One cannot help but wonder what effects such traumatic experiences may have upon later life. ...

"What is called for is a well-thought-out approach to the eradication of antiquated beliefs and practices which cause so much needless suffering, mutilation, tragedy and death ... We can begin with carefully designed programs, possibly under the auspices of the United Nations (or a similar body), with the purpose of rendering obsolete the practice of circumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society."


For the full text of Dr. Montagu's MUTILATED HUMANITY:
An Anthropologist Looks at Circumcision and its Probable Origin,
delivered at THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON CIRCUMCISION,
held from April 30-May 3, 1991 in San Francisco, California, see
http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/montagu.html

copyright Van Lewis - 2000

030426 - Letter to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital

I have been working against genital mutilation for years. Here's an example of one kind of work I have been doing. This is a leter to the search committee for a new CEO of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital in Tallahassee, Florida. It was sent on 26 April 2003. VL


Mr. Dennis Boyle
Chair-elect
TMH Board of Directors

Frank Gredler, M.D.
Chair-elect
TMH Medical Executive Committee

Ms. Susan Thompson
Immediate Past Chair
TMH Board of Directors

David Saint, M.D.
Immediate Past Chair
TMH Medical Executive Committee

Mr. Larry Strom
Past Chair
TMH Board of Directors

Karl Hempel, M.D.
Past Chair
TMH Medical Executive Committee

Mr. Chuck Mitchell
Past Chair
TMH Board of Directors

Joe Camps, M.D.
Past Chair
TMH Medical Executive Committee

Mr. Jerry McDaniel
Ex officio, Chair
TMH Board of Directors

Todd Patterson, D.O.
Ex officio, Chair
TMH Medical Executive Committee

Dear TMH Search Committee:

Congratulations for seeking input from the community for your important task of selecting a new CEO for TMH. I have a suggestion for a touchstone question you could ask your candidates. It would help you differentiate knowledgeable, honest, courageous candidates from those lacking in one or more of these important traits, help separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

Ask your candidates whether TMH should be permitting non-therapeutic circumcisions of minors to be done on its premises, and then carefully observe them as they answer.

The clear and correct answer is a simple, straightforward "No. Absolutely not."

In this letter I give you some of the essential information verifying this truth and access to much more.

First I will tell you about a radical change in the US legal situation of nontherapeutic circumcision that has just occurred and that you will be hearing more about shortly from others, no doubt.

A settlement was reached very recently in the FIRST US legal case brought by a young man with a so-called "normal" circumcision, in federal court, against both the doctor who circumcised him and the not-for-profit hospital that allowed it to happen. (A Catholic hospital, by the way.)

Both the doctor and hospital settled. The amount has not been made public. I don't know whether it will be. My impression is that it is probably in excess of $25,000, may well be over $50,000, and could be over $75,000.

Take the middle figure and multiply it by 1,200,000, the approximate number of non-therapeutic "normal" circumcisions done every year in the United States. Realize that the product, around $60,000,000,000, represents the dollars available ANNUALLY from circumcisers, hospitals, and their medical insurance companies to money-hungry "normally" circumcised young US men. That's BILLION, with a "B". $5 BILLION every 30 days. $166,666,667 every 24 hours. That's enough money to pay for a lot of college educations for needlessly and medically unjustifiably sexually mutilated young men.

How many nontherapeutic circumcisions does TMH allow to be done on its premises every year? At $50,000 each, at $10,000 each, do you have the money to pay the bill? Plus your attorneys fees? To settle? To lose? Every year for the next 20? More years if you don't quit circumcising IMMEDIATELY.

Most of your CEO candidates probably will be either totally ignorant of the relevant anatomical, medical, ethical, financial and legal facts about nontherapeutic circumcision of minors, or not honest enough to share their knowledge with you openly.

Do you really want to hire a person ignorant on such an important matter to TMH's future or a dishonest coward? Somehow I don't think either of those is the kind of person you are looking for, at least I hope not, but you tell me.

IF, in the perhaps unlikely event that you find even one of them who is knowledgeable AND honest AND brave enough to speak plainly to you about this, who is completely forthright with you about it and doesn't equivocate or try to straddle both sides of the fence, put that person - male, female or otherwise - immediately at the top of your CEO list. TMH's solvency may depend on it.

Some of you know I have been working on this problem at TMH and beyond since I and my brother, Ben, were falsely arrested on the public sidewalk outside TMH along Miccosukee Road on December 17, 1970, for protesting against the totally unnecessary and heinous sex crimes being committed inside.

In jail that day with Ben, I said to him, "One day you and I will read competent scientific neuroanatomy of the human male prepuce." I was 27 years old. I'm now 59, 60 in May. THM is still allowing sex criminals to operate undisturbed inside. The main differences between 1970 and 2003 are that

1. now the anatomical and other science proving the gross criminality of nontherapeutic circumcision is completely airtight (see ), and

2. it's not just angry young men but highly respected professional medial ethicists who say that circumcision is "criminal assault" ("Altering Baby Boys' Bodies - The Ethics of Infant Male Circumcision" ), and

3. the big money has started flowing to the innocent victims at last, praise God!

Competent scientific neuroanatomy of the human male prepuce was finally published in 1996 in the British Journal of Urology, 26 years after Tallahassee jailed Ben and me for trying to protect babies from circumcisers. The BJU published a confirming study in 1999. You may read that scientific evidence for yourselves at http://research.cirp.org

In my opinion, it would be a very good idea for you not only to read it but to understand it as well. It isn't rocket science. Most US men and women just don't WANT to understand it. They want to ignore it, stay ignorant of it, and failing that, to MISunderstand it. None of these cowardly efforts at denial will change the scientific facts that TMH will be forced by the law to live with, if it chooses that hard, stupid route and does not choose the far easier and smarter route of living with them voluntarily.

Circumcision is damned whichever route TMH chooses, so why not choose the less risky and more intelligent, more humane route? It's late in the process to do so, but maybe still not quite too late. TMH could pretend to be a modern, progressive, leading hospital. It's still not entirely too late to do that. It might be worth a lot in the future to beat Tallahassee Community Hospital to the punch now. I have started working on them too, but TMH has a 32 year head start. Isn't that enough? WIN! In America, what else is there?

I knew that the neuroanatomy of the human male prepuce would prove to be very interesting, but I had no idea that it would be as interesting as it is. What these medical anatomists discovered, easily when they finally looked, was a major human sense organ new to science. ASTONISHING that science had (consciously? deliberately? purposefully?) overlooked a major human sense organ until nearly the 21st century! It is located in the inner foreskin, in the mucosal tissues. The discoverers, Taylor, Lockwood and Taylor, named it the "ridged band". It contains by far the highest density of nerve endings yet discovered in the penis.

And it isn't just nerve endings, as eyes aren't, as ears aren't, as noses and the tongue aren't. It has its own highly complex biostructural reality in which those nerve endings are strategically embedded, just as eyes and ears and noses and tongues do. Far from being "just a tiny piece of skin", the adult human male prepuce is a large, highly organized complex of skin, nerve, muscle, vascular and other tissues, all of which together perform MANY essential human functions throughout life, from physically protective to sensory to immunological to erogenous to biomechanical and sexual.

You mean normal human sexual structures have normal human sexual functions? MY GOD! WHAT A STUPENDOUS SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY!

The skin area missing from the adult male penis circumcised in infancy averages 15 square inches, the size of a 3" x 5" index card, some are much larger, and contains the highest density of nerve endings known to exist in the penis. It is many square inches of pure sexual firepower. Chopping it up, amputating it and throwing it away or selling it to the highest bidder because nineteenth century quacks thought doing so would cause enough genital pain and prevent enough sexual pleasure to stop masturbation and therefore prevent insanity (see ) IS insanity, pure and simple, start to finish.

Nontherapeutic circumcision is fundamentally a mental/emotional illness in circumcisers. Treat THAT ILLNESS, not normal male anatomy instead. Doctors are supposed to treat serious illness, not perfect health. Circumcision/genital mutilation illness can be deadly, for both victims of it, "patient" and circumciser.

I call the sense organ in the male foreskin - containing tens of thousands of Meisner's corpuscles and other nerve endings - the male's "sexual eye" in honor of my Harvard biology professor, the Jewish Nobel Laureate, George Wald, the man who discovered vitamin A in the retina of the eye and how it works there with light to form the molecular/energetic basis of vision. He was the first human being to understand how the visual pigments change shape as they absorb a photon of light, and change back as they give it up again, many times every second. It is this vibration of the molecule that life has learned to use, in four independent evolutionary lines - insects, mollusks, vertebrates, and (what's the 4th one?) - to set off nerve impulses to the brain that result in vision.

My presentation to the 16th World Congress of Sexology, held March 10-14, 2003, in Havana, Cuba, about George Wald's essay entitled "Circumcision", an important and historic essay he wrote in 1975, is now available at http://StopInfantCircumcision.org/ via the link there under "Dr. George Wald - Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine 1967", which takes you directly to my presentation to the 1,700 sexologists in Cuba last month:

Dr. Francis Crick, discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, is mentioned in my paper as one of the original endorsers of the "Ashley Montagu Resolution to End the Genital Mutilation of Children Worldwide: A Petition to the World Court, the Hague", written by developmental neuropsychologist James Prescott, Ph.D., and named by him for the anthropologist, Ashley Montagu, Ph.D., both also signers of the Montagu Resolution together with Dr. Jonas Salk and many others. The Montagu Resolution is available now for your endorsement, too, and everyone else's, at . We are receiving important endorsements every day from physicians and others all over the world. Sign today. Get in on the ground floor. And read there what people all over the world are saying about circumcision/genital mutilation of minors. It can be an eye-opening experience for those of us who grew up in a genitally mutilating culture assuming incorrectly that genital mutilation is normal or even necessary.

I urge TMH to face this reality and lead. Precedent has already been set for this by an Australian health concern, Hunter Health, which this month, on 2 April 2003, announced that neonatal circumcisions would no longer be allowed at any of its facilities. You may see their announcement at http://maitland.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=news&subclass=local&category=health&story_id=219024&y=2003&m=4

The British Medical Association has just come out with new guidelines for nontherapeutic circumcisions. See "the law & ethics of male circumcision - guidance for doctors - March 2003" at http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/malecircumcision2003 and at
http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/bma2003/

The British National Health Service, by the way, quit paying for nontherapeutic circumcisions in 1950, after an excellent article on the subject, "The Fate of the Foreskin", was published in the British Medical Journal of 24 December 1949. You can read it at . As a result, circumcision virtually died out in the UK almost overnight in 1950.

The same process happened in Canada where all but one province now refuses to fund it.

And it's happening here, too. Five US states in just the last 9 months have quit paying Medicaid taxes for nontherapeutic circumcisions; Arizona, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, and Utah. They join California, Mississippi, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, and Washington state, all of which quit paying some time earlier. That's 22%, over 1/5th of the states that have quit now.

Florida may not be so far behind. I have found most of Florida's legislators, although agonizingly slow on the subject, not nearly as slow as most of Florida's physicians and hospital boards. (Update: Florida became the 12th state to quit, on 1 July, 2003. Florida has more recently been followed by Maine, Louisana, Idaho, and Minnesota, making a total of 16 states that no longer fund nontherapeutic, medically unnecessary, "elective" [but not elective for the boy whose penis it actually is] circumcisions as of August 2005. Over 30% now, nearly 1/3rd.)

Australia has nearly stopped circumcising and New Zealand now has one of the lowest rates in the English-speaking world, which is the only part of the world, by the way, to ever broadly adopt medicalized circumcision in the first place.

Statements from medical societies throughout the world have been collected at this site, :

"In September 2002, under the lead of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP), Paediatrics and Child Health Division, six major medical societies of Australasia developed a unified position statement on male circumcision. All six medical societies (the RACP, Australian Association of Paediatric Surgeons, New Zealand Society of Paediatric Surgeons, Urological Society of Australasia, Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, and Paediatric Society of New Zealand) have now corroborated the Canadian Paediatric Society, declaring that circumcision of newborn males should not be routinely performed. The new statement firmly declares: 'There are no medical indications for routine male circumcision.'"

The RACP's full statement is available at http://www.racp.edu.au/hpu/paed/circumcision/

Last year Saskatchewan's College of Physicians and Surgeons warned physicians strongly, in two separate memos, against performing nontherapeutic circumcisions, for all the now-obvious reasons. They emphasized ethical problems and the "long-tail liability", two decades for physicians reckless enough to mutilate healthy genitals and hospitals foolish enough to allow them to do so in hospital facilities:
http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/sask2002/
http://www.cirp.org/news/2002-02-21reginaleaderpost/ http://www.courtchallenge.com/letters/skcoll2.html

Nontherapeutic circumcision is ending now because it is too damaging and dangerous not only to its usually youthful victims, but also, at long last, to the perpetrators as well.

The fact that I emailed all of this information to you today will remain in my records for future legal reference and use if necessary. I work closely with Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC), a not-for-profit tax-exempt organization started by a Harvard Law School graduate and staffed by some of the most intelligent, aggressive, articulate, dedicated, humane, and determined attorneys it has ever been my privilege and pleasure to meet. I wish I had had their services available to me in 1970. We would live in a different world today if I had.

I have been providing much information such as the information in this email to your COO, Dr. Edward Carney, for several years. I provided much of such information to a former board chair of TMH, Mr. Chuck Mitchell of your present committee, and to his entire board. The records of my certified mailings and receipt thereof by TMH's Board and Chair and COO are intact and ready for the first available lawsuit against TMH.

Wouldn't it be far better for TMH to respond out of concern for its patients than its pocketbook? In over 32 years I have not found it capable of doing so. That is why I have been reduced to working on the legal front. If doctors and hospitals adamantly refuse to take any adult responsibility for ending this madness then lawyers have to, are doing so now. They are hard at work today and will be tomorrow and the next day. Medical doctors and hospital boards for the most part seem too terrified to change course, frozen in fear, like a deer in the headlight of an onrushing train, or too blind to even see the light.

If you haven't already, learn the terrible story of the medical profession's repressive response to the childbed fever discoveries of Ignaz Semmelweis, M.D., in the mid 19th century, about the same time circumcision was getting started in Anglo medicine. Look him up in Google. Fifty years it took official medicine to admit that Semmelweis was right about doctors killing women and children with childbed fever by spreading the contamination with their own hands. In 150 years official US medicine has not been able to admit its terrible mistake of mutilating babies' healthy sex organs with its own hands. The USA is the only country in the world circumcising the majority of its infant males for non-religious reasons, and even Israel is probably not circumcising the majority of its male babies because so many Israelis are Arabs who wait until later in childhood to sexually blind their children. The best time to circumcise a person is not 24 hours or 8 days or 8 years after s/he is born, but 80 years after s/he dies.

Why is the medical profession STILL so incredibly and adamantly resistant to self-correction? Is it simply doctors' grossly overblown egos that prevent them from admitting their own obvious mistakes, even to themselves? Doctors and hospital boards keep patting themselves on the back as the train bears down from behind. Will even ONE of you turn around and look at what's coming? I believe you have serious responsibilities to TMH and to the broader Tallahassee community to do so, responsibilities that you undertook voluntarily and willingly. All I am asking is that you do your job.

All I am asking is that TMH remove itself from the train tracks as soon as possible. Take the fatal noose from around TMH's and your own necks.

All I have been doing for the last 32 years is trying the help. I'm still trying.

Please ask Dr. Brickler, Sr., why he no longer mutilates the healthy penises of healthy babies. I have been told by someone else that he quit at the turn of the millennium. Dr. Brickler has not responded to several messages I have left for him about this, nor to the recent new book I left for him several months ago, "What Your Doctor May NOT Tell You About CIRCUMCISION: Untold Facts About America's Most Common - And Most Unnecessary - Surgery", by Paul Fleiss, M.D., a well-regarded pediatrician in LA (who happens to be Jewish), and Frederick Hodges, Ph.D., an Oxford history-of-medicine graduate, the best of the three best history-of-medicine doctoral programs in the world, I'm told. His Oxford doctoral dissertation is on the history of medicalized circumcision.

I also donated a copy of this important new Warner book to your COO several months ago and one to Mr. Jerry McDaniel of your committee more recently. I'll be happy to give one to any of you who want one. Just email me at VanLewis@MontaguNOCIRCpetition.org and let me know where you want me to drop your personal copy off. (I'm a little low on stock at the moment. First come first served, but I'll get more.)

Examine the medical information at http://DoctorsOpposingCircumcision.org.

Not ALL doctors are frozen in fear or totally clueless. Not all hospitals are frozen in the past. A relatively few are thawing out, waking up to the roar of the train. The screams of the babies for a century and a half haven't been loud enough to awaken most. Why is that? Why don't circumcisers hear the screams and smell the vomit? What is wrong with them?

I witnessed this myself in person. A physician-circumciser I know well invited me to attend one of his circumcisions in order to prove to me that there is nothing wrong with it. I went. The circumciser had decided he was going to do an "experiment" on this kid (medical ethics, anyone?) and do "only" a dorsal slit to make it "less traumatic" and "less damaging" and to "prevent bleeding. There aren't any blood vessels in the centerline", he pontificated.

This baby started screaming with the very first tearing away of the prepuce from the glans, more violently than any screams I have ever heard in my life from any human or animal. The screams were interrupted by the vomiting, projectile, the most violent vomiting I have ever witnessed from any human or animal. I am told that sometimes babies rupture their stomachs from the violence of the vomiting during circumcision, break arms or legs against the "circumstraint". This is genitally mutilative sexual child abuse, plain and simple. Anybody who does it to a healthy minor should go to jail for a LONG time. Whatever happened to "Primum, non nocere", "First, do no harm"?

When the "simple cut" was made the blood started spurting everywhere, necessitating stitching. With every puncture of the needle, more violent screaming. With every drawing through penile flesh of the thread, more projectile vomiting. Screaming and vomiting and blood spurting everywhere and finally, before the end but not by much, the baby was knocked totally unconscious by the pain and trauma. He went totally limp.

This is a truthful, accurate description of this tragic event that I witnessed personally, myself, with my own eyes. I did not make it up. The criminal circumciser is too old and feeble and incompetent now (according to his protective daughter) to be forced to confirm my account.

To make the scene all the more repulsive from my point of view, the circumciser was white, the baby black, the event taking place in the US south where white men have been butchering black men's penises for centuries. (See "Before His Time", a riveting Florida history by Ben Green.)

On the way out of the hospital what does the idiot (with apologies to the real idiots) circumciser ask me?

"Did you have any objection to that?"

The circumciser hadn't even noticed the baby. He was (or pretended to be?) totally clueless. WHY? Was he too focused on the surgery to notice? After over 5,000 (he said) of these completely mad, Frankenstinean penis butcheries, had he just tuned the baby out entirely, in order to be able to accomplish his evil penis mutilation madness in "peace"? You tell me. I don't understand it. Not in the least.

Did I want to kick this circumciser in the balls with every gram of strength I had and then ask HIM, "Did you have any objection to THAT?"

Instead, idiot (with apologies to the real idiots, at least they have a legitimate excuse) gentleman that I am, I said, "I think the baby objected to it."

One day men are going to stop being polite to circumcisers and start kicking, or more likely pulling triggers as David Reimer almost did. Read all about it in the recent book, "As Nature Made Him", by John Colapinto.

You mark my words, every one of you. When men learn what was stolen from them in infancy and the consequences of that mad butchery, circumcisers will be in real physical danger from their victims. I know men who would gladly kill their circumcisers if they could identify and find them. Mine was in mortal danger one day around 1969 - I met with him then, I could have killed him on the spot and I DAMN sure wanted to, BAD - before I finally decided to take the non-violent path in life. Circumcision might have ended a lot sooner if I had killed him then. He died of natural causes, never realizing how close he came to a premature, violent, gruesome death at my hands. Clueless, he was, like most of them. A mighty horrible experience for me, though, as was my circumcision.

And I only realized a couple of years ago that I don't know for a fact that he is the one who actually circumcised me. Had I killed him, I might have been killing the wrong circumciser. He delivered me and had some responsibility for my welfare and probably did it, but he may not have. I don't really know who did it. I'm glad I didn't kill him now, but it took every ounce of self-discipline I could muster at the time not to.

Talk about fear. Talk about frozen in the headlights. No WONDER circumcisers feel they can't change. Today's circumcision "justifies" yesterday's. That's what it's FOR. And prepares the way for tomorrow's, which then will be used to "justify" today's.

But NO nontherapeutic circumcision can stand on its own. It's today's babies who are paying the price for all these many decades of dishonesty and fear on the part of those of us calling ourselves "adults".

Baby's mutilation today "proves" to dad that his own mutilation decades back was "necessary, or at least better, or at least harmless", too. In place of science or just plain childish common sense we allow ourselves to be convinced by irreversible, lifetime sexual mutilation of innocent babies. What a sickness! After that, NOBODY dares to face the horrible truth that here in 21st century USAmerica we are genitally mutilating for life and sometimes thereby killing babies for NOTHING. What a terrible sickness. And on and on and on it goes, and where it stops, nobody knows.

Oh. I didn't tell you. NO NATIONAL OR INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL ORGANIZATION IN THE WORLD TODAY RECOMMENDS NONTHERAPEUTIC CIRCUMCISION. More and more of them are recommending strongly against it.

Got that? Do you understand that? Do you realize what that means?

Why don't they recommend it?

Because their lawyers won't let them.

Why not?

Because there is no competent scientific evidence that evolution and/or God made a mistake by building penises correctly, or that circumcisers improve healthy penises by butchering them. There never will be any.

Should we remove healthy ears and eyelids of babies too "make hygiene easier"? Extract sound teeth of babies to prevent cavities? Amputate healthy breasts of baby girls and boys to prevent breast cancer? (Breast cancer is more common in males than penile cancer. Surely we could at least remove baby BOYS' "useless" breasts to protect old men from breast cancer, couldn't we?) Let's chop out hearts of babies to prevent heart attacks in old people! Behead babies to prevent brain cancer! If we cut EVERYTHING off of the baby there will be NOTHING LEFT TO GO WRONG and the baby will live FOREVER! With NO MEDICAL BILLS! Medicine can establish PERFECT HEALTH FOREVER in the entire population (except for the last butcher standing) and put itself out of business entirely, by carrying prophylactic circumcision to its logical conclusion. The triumph of modern medicine over human disease at last.

Members of this committee are uniquely positioned to move TMH forward on this issue. You are also uniquely positioned on the train tracks. Not every hospital in the country has been as carefully and well prepared for court as TMH has, more's the pity. This train is coming whether I help it along or not, but I have built a well-marked spur pointed directly at TMH. The final segment of track has just been laid at YOUR door. EACH ONE OF YOU IS INDIVIDUALLY AND PERSONALLY LEGALLY RESPONSIBLE AND LEGALLY LIABLE. Nobody can stop this train. Can't SOMEBODY on this committee see the danger coming? Is EVERYBODY blinded by the onrushing headlight?

ARC attorney: What did you know and when did you know it?

TMH search committee member: All this is news to me.

ARC attorney: Have you ever seen this email before?

TMH search committee member: Never.

ARC attorney: How about this certified letter with your signature on the return receipt?

Look. I'm selfish. I want a solvent hospital in Tallahassee. Is that such a terrible crime? Can ANYBODY up there accept ANY responsibility for TMH's financial safety, if not patient safety and human rights? Have ANY of you, has even ONE of you ever heard the term, "risk management"? Forward this email to your risk management office, if you have one.

Does TMH have a medical ethics department? If so, send one to your medical ethics office, too. Make them earn their pay.

And WHY does this have to be so hard? WHY? Can ANYBODY up there tell me? I want ONE of you to send me ONE honest email answering this communication completely and competently, in detail and in depth. ONE. Answer every question I ask you and respond honestly and competently to everything in this email, paragraph by paragraph. Don't leave ONE out.

I'm not holding my breath. I'm providing ARC's attorneys a copy of this communication to you.

The train is coming. Move or be moved. The choice is yours. Further delay only hurts everyone. Find cash somewhere else, not out of defenseless babies' innocent, healthy penises.

You are all completely mad to allow even ONE circumciser to butcher even ONE more healthy baby's only penis for life in TMH. Every one of you. Loony as fruitcakes. Totally insane.

Have you no sense of personal responsibility? Have you no shame? No guilt? No fear? No love? Have you no human feeling left at all?

I await your response. Patiently. I've been waiting for over 32 years for SOMEONE in TMH to go sane on this issue, I can wait a few days longer.

(Update: As of August, 2005, I've heard nothing from anyone.)

I can, but the babies can't, and they are the only ones who count with me anymore. "Adults", so-called, can go take a flying leap as far as I'm concerned, every one of you. Just don't do it off the top floor of TMH. It's too long a fall. You might hurt whatever is left of your precious and only body for life.

Van Lewis
P.O. Box 323
Panacea, Florida 32346
697-8576
http://MontaguNOCIRCpetition.org

Cc: Mary Ann Lindley
Bill Berlow
Judy Doyle
Erika Peterman
Mike Pope
Ron Hartung
Mike Pate
Zhanna Lyle
Jane Nelson
Marilyn Milos
Gary Burlingame
Doctors Opposing Circumcision
Attorneys for the Rights of the Child
Stop Infant Circumcision Society

"The greatest crime against humanity
is the torture and mutilation of children."

James Prescott, Ph.D.
http://violence.de

Origin of Circumcising - short version

I think circumcising originated as a method of helping to CREATE AGRICULTURAL SLAVES, during the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture to slave agriculture in the middle east. An early farmer's limiting factor as to how much food s/he can produce is not usually water, or land, or seeds, or sunshine. Once they understand how to farm, their limiting factor is THEMSELVES. Their own BODIES. HUMAN LABOR.

I think early farmers, facing hunter-gatherers hunting and gathering in their farm fields at first regarded these people as agricultural pests, and killed them whenever they could.

Then they must have realized their mistake. Dead people can't work the fields.

So the next step is to capture them instead of kill them, intending to make field hands out of them - slaves.

Actually catching one, though, presents new sets of problems. How do you force a wild man to do what you tell him to? How does one man most clearly and effectively establish dominance over another?

How about total castration? Wouldn't that do it? If one guy cuts off another's penis and testicles, who's dominant? Not the guy with his dick cut off, I'll tell you that.

There are three primary problems with total castration as a method of making useful agricultural slaves.

1) It kills too many. They bleed to death or die of infection.

2) Those who survive can't reproduce. When they do die you have to go out and catch and castrate and train more. And

3) the ones who survive aren't the LEAST bit interested in doing what you tell them to. All they want to do is kill you. You would have been ahead of the game by killing them in the first place. The whole castration thing was a complete waste of time, something a primitive farmer can't afford.

Circumcision was the logical solution to all three problems.

1) Not as many died. Some still did, but not nearly as many.

2) The survivors CAN still reproduce, thus the adult slaves make new ones readily. No need to go out and find new slaves when you can make all you want at home. (And the mutilation DOES very nicely differentiate the slaves from the real people.)

3) Most importantly, the circumcision leaves the slave with something left to lose. Instead of changing him into an enraged, uncontrollable eunuch, you make him into a cowed coward. (Cow-herd?) He KNOWS what you'll do to him if he DOESN'T do what you say; come back for the rest.

It is only much later that religious mythology gets built up around what was originally developed and well known to all involved as a method of converting wild populations of independent hunter-gatherer groups into agricultural slaves.

The disaster gets explained in the first generation of slave groups as "It must have been God's will", and then later as "It must have been God's will and command", and finally as "God commanded circumcision" blah blah blah.

Circumcision was discovered as an effective technique in the economically "necessary" effort to make agricultural slaves. The marking was a side benefit. It marks you as inferior, dominated, a slave. After enough generations of it the slave cultures end up doing it to themselves, and rationalizing it with "religion", even after the "master race" has long since died out and left the scene.

Circumcision is the primary evidence of and the primary human artifact still remaining from the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture to slave agriculture in the middle east maybe 10 thousand to 6 thousand years ago.

050809 - To Florida State University's President and Schools of Medicine and Law

Thomas Kent Wetherell, President
Florida State University
and faculty and associates of the
FSU Medical and Law Schools


Dear President Wetherell and FSU Medical and Law Schools faculty and associates,

Copied below my email message to you here, is the abstract of an article published recently in the Journal of Medical Ethics, which ends with the following sentence:

“We conclude that it is ethically inappropriate to subject children—male or female—to the acknowledged risks of circumcision and contend that there is no compelling legal authority for the common view that male circumcision is lawful.”

A full text pdf copy of the paper may be downloaded from
http://jme.bmjjournals.com/cgi/reprint/31/8/463
or
http://tinyurl.com/cfzt8
and a copy is attached for your convenience.

I write to you today trying to prevent unnecessary pain and trauma, and unnecessary physical, emotional and mental damages and harms, and further unnecessary risks, including death, that we adults ignorantly, unthinkingly, unnecessarily, and unethically still impose on the majority of male babies and many additional male children in the United States of America.

I am also trying to save lives.

If this were anything less important than life-and-death I would not be sending this message to any of you, let alone all of you. In the name of the thousands of children whose lives we unnecessarily and recklessly endanger every day, I ask you all to read it, and, given the gravity of these realities, to respond to it appropriately, despite possibly intense external and maybe considerable internal pressure not to. (I know about both. I was arrested and jailed with my brother, Ben, in Tallahassee on 17 December 1970, simply for speaking out peacefully in public on this issue. Punishments today usually are less overt, but no less real. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

I look forward to hearing from you, and to seeing you and FSU’s medical and law schools taking action where action is obviously needed.

Silence gives consent. Please do not give your consent any longer to subjecting innocent, healthy babies and children to our daily, unnecessary, obscene child death lottery. (I can email anyone who wants it a steadily growing list of names of babies and children that I already know about, dead from circumcising.)

It is important for you to understand that this view is not unsupported. It is becoming mainstream now. Science and scientists at the highest level support it, including Francis Crick and George Wald, Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine. See http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1962/index.html
http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1967/index.html and
http://StopInfantCircumcision.org/crick-wald.htm

Today you can join Nobel laureates Crick and Wald, physicians Jonas Salk and Benjamin Spock, and thousands of others in declaring your opposition to the genital mutilation of children worldwide by endorsing the Ashley Montagu Resolution and Petition at http://MontaguNoCircPetition.org . Please do.

Please educate yourselves competently on this scientifically and ethically simple (young children can understand it; I know four-year-olds who get it) but often emotionally difficult-because-tragic subject. Then educate your students, whether they like it or not. That is what we Florida taxpayers pay you for. We work hard for our money, it’s expensive for us to keep paying your salaries, and we need to get our money’s worth out of public education.

Babies’ and children’s lives are riding on your ability and willingness to respond to this information sanely and effectively. For their sake and for yours, I wish you well with your thoughts, feelings and actions on this subject, if any. Please let me know if I can help in any way.

Finally, shooting the messenger will not solve the problem. I would appreciate it very much if you would refrain from doing so. I’ve had enough of that and don’t need any more.

CUT CLAMS, NOT BABIES!

Van Lewis
P.O.Box 323
Panacea, Florida 32346
vanlewis@post.harvard.edu

cc: Florida House of Representatives
Florida Senate
Governor Jeb Bush
Tallahassee Democrat
Bishop John Howard, Episcopal Diocese of Florida
Broad public distribution


On 10/4/05 20:54, "Van Lewis" asked:

FSU Physicians and related persons,

Does FSU’s physician and health care community have any conscience at all, or any sense of medical ethics?

Van Lewis, Administrator
Ashley Montagu Resolution
http://MontaguNoCircPetition.org
...
------------------------------------------------------------------
I provided information last April in the email indicated above to individuals in the FSU Medical School community concerning medically unnecessary, elective (by others but involuntary on the part of the person cut) genital cutting and mutilation of minors, without the mutilated minors’ informed consent (which they are legally incapable of giving). I will be happy to forward the entire email to any who may be interested in seeing it.

Having received only negative responses (and very few of those; two, if I recall correctly; one only mildly negative, one of different character) from the over 100 FSU Medical School personnel addressed in the earlier email to my sincere efforts to help (both them and through them the people they are charged with teaching and caring for), this message is sent as well to persons associated with the FSU Law School in the (foolish?) hope that FSU’s lawyers will prove themselves capable of understanding more clearly and responding more effectively and more expeditiously to the relevant issues than FSU’s doctors have so far.

Copies are also provided to Florida’s legislators (the funders of these two public educational institutions), JEB!, the local newspaper, Episcopal Bishop John Howard, my priest, mission board, some local physicians, and others.

What IS a penis, anyway?

For those of you who may not already know it, in the earlier 1990s, barely ten years ago, a highly complex, highly evolved, highly vascularized, highly innervated human sense organ, new then to science and containing, among other things, tens of thousands of highly specialized nerve endings, was discovered within the mucosal skin encircling the inner male foreskin. Named the “ridged band” by its scientific discoverers (I’m sure they weren’t the first to know anything about it, just the first known to have looked for and found it scientifically), it is a highly structured human sense organ - like an eye, an ear, a tongue – its complex and exquisite structure enabling it to perform it’s complex and important human survival functions. It contains the highest density of nerve endings yet discovered in the human penis. These nerve endings and the nerve plexus they connect to and serve are “hard-wired” via the spinal cord to a vital center in the human male brain the location of which, I read the other day, has only just recently been discovered.

I call the ridged band the male’s “sexual eye” in honor of my magnificent college biology professor, Nobel laureate George Wald, and his intelligent 1975-1997 efforts to end medically unnecessary, non-therapeutic, “elective” circumcising of children of both sexes. (See http://StopInfantCircumcision.org/crick-wald.htm ) George won the Nobel prize in 1967 for his discovery of Vitamin A in the retina of the visual eye and how it works with light to form the molecular/energetic basis of vision. See http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1967/index.html

George didn’t get to – he died in 1997 – but you can still read the original articles reporting and confirming the important scientific discovery of the male sexual eye in the British Journal of Urology of 1996 and 1999 at:
http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/taylor/
http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/cold-taylor/
A discussion by one of the authors is available at http://research.cirp.org

This complex, normal, necessary human sense organ is the exact target of male circumcision, first adopted as medicine in England and the US beginning in the mid-1800s. The pre-germ-theory genital-mutilation-initiating doctors of the day (quacks, by our standards) said (and wrote, fortunately) that by circumcising children (and, not much later, babies) they were trying to stop them from masturbating. Males AND females, by the way. They said they thought masturbation caused insanity. (Circumcising is far more likely to achieve that undesirable result, through iatrogenic post-traumatic genital cutting-and-mutilation stress disorder.)

Over the decades since this inauspicious beginning, the US medical profession has claimed in writing that masturbation causes and/or circumcising prevents and/or cures club foot, diarrhea, curvature of the spine, bed-wetting and over 200 other diseases, not one of which has ever been proved to be caused by masturbation or prevented or cured by circumcising. (Circumcising them doesn’t stop children from masturbating, either – if anything it tends to increase masturbation, not decrease it [Laumann http://www.cirp.org/library/general/laumann/] – but it does stop them from masturbating normally.)

These nineteenth-century quacks said they hoped they could stop children from masturbating by causing them as much genital pain as possible (thus anesthesia was discouraged until 1999), and by destroying for life as much sexual pleasure as possible, with amputation of healthy sexual body parts in childhood and infancy. Only later, after the turn of the century with the maturation of a second, less forthright generation of medical mutilators, were the reverse medical myths/lies invented that “babies can’t feel circumcision” (scientific investigations indicate that they probably feel it more acutely than adults do), and that “circumcising doesn’t harm, and probably helps adult male sexuality and pleasure”.

These poor, clueless men apparently were convinced that they could improve on God/evolution’s complex design/result for the human sex organs and organism as a whole with simple, blundering, genitally mutilative, finally inexplicable amputations.

Astonishing. And in my view, pitiful.

This is literally why circumcising was adopted in medicine in Anglophone countries. I still find it hard to believe. Can you tell? I didn’t make it up, though. I couldn’t have. I read the medical history. Have you? Truth here is definitely stranger than any fiction I could have imagined.

Ever since then medical circumcising has been a vicious circle, a criminally insane cure in search of an even more vicious disease. It has never found one (although circumcised and circumcising evangelists are now trying to force AIDS to play that role as they have with so many other diseases in the past), but the uncontroverted modern scientific neuroanatomy of the foreskin proves that circumcising is highly efficient at accomplishing exactly what it’s original medical proponents said they intended to do with it; sexually blind and sexually debilitate children and the adults they may become, if they survive this mad “criminal assault”. (Margaret Somerville, Founder and Director, Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, McGill University: http://intact.ca/canary.htm )

Circumcising healthy babies and children today is clearly criminal activity.

Why is medicine so incompetent and so slow at correcting its own obvious, deadly errors?

Why do most doctors depend on lawyers (and mere clam farmers like me, for God’s sake?) to correct their insanities?

And where are all the lawyers, anyway?

You’d think with the inconceivable amounts of money to be made out of this massive national tragedy lawyers would be already as thick on this issue as molasses in January at the pre-global-warming North Pole – the USA is the only country in the world where the medical profession mutilates the genitals of the majority of the male babies, and this despite the fact that no national or international medical body in the world recommends circumcising healthy people, let alone children, and most of them are recommending more and more strongly as time goes on that circumcising not be done – but US lawyers are nearly as scarce as US doctors when (for males, anyway) it comes to defending the firmly established human and legal rights to bodily integrity, including genital integrity, from 3,300 gross violations of them every day in the USA, one totally unnecessary lifetime sexual mutilation every 26 seconds. (I know a few, doctors AND lawyers, who actually do defend children from this evil. God bless them all.)

How did it ever come to this?

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
- Albert Einstein

Going sane on the subject appears to be nearly impossible for genitally mutilated populations, for families within such societies, and for individuals; male, female and otherwise, doctors, lawyers or Indian chiefs.

Why can’t FSU’s law and medical schools lead the nation on this life-and-death issue? What is holding you back? Is it your father’s circumcision? Your own? Is it your spouse’s? Your son’s?

Whatever it is, it’s not worth taking one additional child’s life to protect. It’s not even worth risking one child’s life, let alone over a million of them every year.

No adult has any right to subject healthy, normal children to the totally unnecessary death lottery that circumcising them is. Deciding to continue circumcising children is deciding to kill some of them. Essentially for nothing. It’s crazy. If it’s not crazy there’s no such thing.

Is there even ONE FSU employee who would kill a child for nothing?

If so, I want to meet that person. Who is it? Stand up in public now and be counted.

I offer to debate anyone on this subject, in public, anytime, anywhere.

And preferably before we kill another child with our cowardly and despicable silence on this issue.

Debate me in public anyone?

Responsible, vigorous action that leaves me out of the picture entirely? (Fine with me! I don’t need to spend my time this way if people with more voice and more respectable authority will take over the thankless job. My clams need me.)

Or just more cowardly silence? More business as usual? More vile, child-killing insanity?

IS ANYONE actually ALIVE out there?

I’m listening for your reply, hoping to find some life, somewhere in outer space, which this obviously is.

CUT CLAMS, NOT BABIES!

Van Lewis
vanlewis@post.harvard.edu
http://CastrateCircumcising.blogspot.com

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http://tinyurl.com/cfzt8

LAW, ETHICS, AND MEDICINE
A covenant with the status quo? Male circumcision and the new BMA guidance to doctors
M Fox and M Thomson
School of Law, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK

Correspondence to:
Michael Thomson
School of Law, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK; m.o.thomson@keele.ac.uk

ABSTRACT
This article offers a critique of the recently revised BMA guidance on routine neonatal male circumcision and seeks to challenge the assumptions underpinning the guidance which construe this procedure as a matter of parental choice. Our aim is to problematise continued professional willingness to tolerate the non-therapeutic, non-consensual excision of healthy tissue, arguing that in this context both professional guidance and law are uncharacteristically tolerant of risks inflicted on young children, given the absence of clear medical benefits. By interrogating historical medical explanations for this practice, which continue to surface in contemporary justifications of non-consensual male circumcision, we demonstrate how circumcision has long existed as a procedure in need of a justification. We conclude that it is ethically inappropriate to subject children—male or female—to the acknowledged risks of circumcision and contend that there is no compelling legal authority for the common view that male circumcision is lawful.

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On August 9, 2005, sixty years to the day after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki by the US government, Doctors Opposing Circumcision at http://DoctorsOpposingCircumcision.org has responded to the paper indicated above and attached, with a letter to the Journal of Medical Ethics at http://jme.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/31/8/463#345
or
http://tinyurl.com/ayu27

Circumcision Bioethics: A Proposal for Reform
9 August 2005

George Hill,
Executive Secretary
Doctors Opposing Circumcision, Suite 42, 2442 NW Market Street, Seattle, Washington 98107-4137, USA,
John V. Geishker, JD, LL.M
Send letter to journal:
Re: Circumcision Bioethics: A Proposal for Reform
Email George Hill, et al.

To the Editor:
We at Doctors Opposing Circumcision (DOC) are gratified by the publication of this paper by Fox and Thompson.1 They confirm the position previously taken by the Norwegian Council for Medical Ethics that male non-therapeutic circumcision violates important principles of medical ethics.2 Their findings also are consistent with Articles 1, 2, and 20 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Bioethics.3
DOC concurs with their criticism of the British Medical Association (BMA) statement. As previously reported, we think it is deficient in that it fails to recognize 1) the probable unlawfulness of the circumcision of male children, 2) the lack of medical value, 3) the complications, risks, and other disadvantages, 4) the functional value of the prepuce, 5) the inherent violations of human rights, and 6) the clearly unethical nature of child circumcision.4
Lawfulness
We also believe that non-therapeutic circumcision of children is already unlawful, because the mutilative nature of circumcision makes it a violation of existing child protection laws. For example, a man from Clark County, Washington, USA currently is in gaol for three years for child assault because he attempted to perform a religiously motivated non-therapeutic circumcision on his son.5 Without medical justification, may a parent do by proxy consent what he cannot legally do himself?
We think that, in England and Wales, the circumcision of children is a misdemeanour under the Children and Young Persons Act (1933). The continued performance of non-therapeutic circumcision on children in Britain and elsewhere depends on the failure of public prosecutors to enforce existing law.
Where do we go from here?
Doctors have a clear duty to decline all inefficacious or unethical operations on minors. DOC has prepared a guidance on conscientious objection to the performance of non-therapeutic circumcision on children that provides justification and authority for refusing to perform a non-therapeutic circumcision on a child.6 We recommend that all doctors who may be asked to perform a non-therapeutic circumcision of a child download a copy from our website so they may be acquainted with their ethical rights and duties.
Certainly, the Medical Ethics Committee of the BMA has more work to do. A revision to the 2003 statement already is needed because of its original inadequacies.
The General Medical Council needs to grasp this nettle firmly. It is time to cast out its temporizing 1997 policy. A new guidance for doctors that is consistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and Articles 1,2, and 20 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Bioethics (1997) is needed.
In a case involving caning, the European Court of Human Rights ruled:

Children and other vulnerable individuals, in particular, are entitled to State protection, in the form of effective deterrence, against such serious breaches of personal integrity.7
We believe that this should apply at least as forcefully to cases of bodily mutilation as to cases of caning. Action by Parliament may be necessary to provide effective deterrence.

Medical societies world-wide have an ethical duty to inform their members of the unethical status of non-therapeutic circumcision of children. Medical Licencing Boards have a duty to issue regulations regarding the non-therapeutic circumcision of children to ensure that medical practice in their jurisdiction complies with the highest standards of medical ethics.
These actions will usher in a new era in which doctors respect the legal right of children to genital integrity.
George Hill, Bioethicist
Executive Secretary

John V. Geisheker, J.D, LL.M.
General Counsel
Doctors Opposing Circumcision
Suite 42
2442 NW Market Street
Seattle, Washington 98107-4137
USA
Web: http://www.doctorsopposingcircumcision.org
References
1. Fox M, Thomson M. A covenant with the status quo? Male circumcision and the new BMA guidance to doctors. J Med Ethics 2005;31(8):463-9. [Full Text]
2. Gulbrandsen P. Rituell omskjæring av gutter. [Ritual circumcision of boys.] Tidsskr Nor Lægeforen [Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association] 2001;121(25):2994. [Full Text] (In Norwegian)
3. Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine: Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine. Adopted at Oviedo, 4 April 1997. [Full Text]
4. Hill G. BMA circumcision guidance has significant omissions. BMJ; Rapid Response: 14 April 2003. [Full Text]
5. Stephanie Rice. Circumcision Attempt—Father sentenced to three years. The Columbian, Vancouver, Washington, Thursday, December 16, 2004.
6. Denniston GC, Geisheker JV, Hill G. Conscientious Objection to the Performance of Non-Therapeutic Circumcision of Children. Seattle: Doctors Opposing Circumcision, 2005. [Full Text] (PDF)
7. A. v United Kingdom. [1998] 2 FLR 959. (In the European Court of Human Rights)