Limits to Religious Freedom: Circumcision and Herpes

I'm not religious although I don't think I'm necessarily anti-religious. People can believe what they like and within certain constraints act as they like based on their religious beliefs. If you want to believe that there's someone in the sky watching you or some Force in the universe that is interested in the doings of human beings, it doesn't really impact me. Go for it.  I came down on the side of the Catholic Church over the contraception provision controversy. Basically I think that as long as you aren't hurting anyone else the state should pretty much stay out of your affairs. I think that's a general good rule for most citizens and it's a constitutionally protected right for religious institutions. You mind your business and I will mind mine. Good fences make good neighbors. Each captain runs his own crew. We all have to tend our own gardens. Live and let live. And so on.
But.............
There are limits. You don't get to sacrifice babies to Baal. You don't get to force your children to become temple prostitutes for Ishtar. The Catholic Church has no constitutional right to priest-boy sex. Although your religion might find dogs unclean you can't go around banning or killing other people's dogs. And it's iffy because parents do have the right to oversee and direct medical care for their minor children but if a parent wanted to use prayer instead of medicine to treat a gunshot wound to a child I would not lose sleep if the state intervened, treated the child and arrested the parent. Those sorts of actions would make me hostile to religion, not just because the religious person is accepting myths that to me make no sense, but because they are harming other people. That's the red line I think.


So if you tell me that your religion requires that a grown man undertake bloody oral genital contact with a baby so that said baby becomes an acceptable member of your religious society , then I'm gonna reach for my baseball bat and keep a close eye on you while I call the cops. Because that is FAR across any sort of red line.

A baby died at a New York hospital in September after contracting herpes from a controversial circumcision ritual.The infant died at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, where the cause of death was listed as "disseminated herpes simplex virus Type 1, complicating ritual circumcision with oral suction," according to the New York Daily News.

Now, the Brooklyn District Attorney's office is looking further into the case, the Jewish Week reports. The boy is the second New York area infant in recent years to die from complications related to the Orthodox Jewish ritual of metzitzah b'peh, during which "the mohel places his mouth on the freshly circumcised penis to draw blood away from the cut,"according to the New York City Department of Heath.For its part, the state health department — then headed by Antonina Novello, appointed by Republican Gov. Pataki, who himself had strong ties to the Orthodox community — reached its own agreement with chasidic leaders in June of 2006, hailed by Rabbi Niederman in a press release as a “historic protocol” and the one to which Zwiebel referred to above.

The 2010 letter to rabbis from the commissioner of the state health department, referenced above, noted that “over the past five years” there have been “several documented cases” of herpes simplex Type 1 viruses in newborns who underwent metzitzah b’peh in New York City. 

When it came to light that two more babies had been infected (apparently not by Fischer), Frieden issued an “Open Letter to the Jewish Community,” which recommended — but stopped short of requiring — a cessation of the practice altogether, instead endorsing alternatives to the practice, like using a sterile glass tube (which is done in modern Orthodox circles). 

Now putting aside the generally accepted hypocrisy that male circumcision is just fine while female circumcision is a Stone Age evil that must be stamped out, it seems to me that whatever your feelings might be about the propriety of chopping away genital tissue from newborns, at the very least you would have to admit that a man having oral contact with a boy's bleeding penis as part of a religious ritual is not safe and shouldn't be legal. 

Unfortunately because of political considerations in New York this has not attracted a huge amount of media attention. Finally law enforcement is looking into it because of the death of the babies, but honestly it never should have come to that. This is something where religion and state must clash and the state MUST win. The men who performed this deed should be identified, arrested and prosecuted with the full vigor of the law. The city and state of New York need to give out information about the health dangers of this practice and convince parents not to allow it. And finally if the parents refuse to change their behavior they ought to be arrested and charged the same way we would charge any other parent who harms a child. I don't see a lot of grey here. It's black and white for me. Man putting his mouth on boy's privates= man going to jail.

But what do you think?

1) Should this practice be outlawed? Do you see religious freedom problems?

2) Should the parents and/or rabbi go to jail?

3) Is focus on this practice anti-religious?

4) If outlawed would this interfere with parental prerogatives?

Mitt Romney converts dead people

Do you know what happens when you die? Well Mitt Romney does. He's going to baptise you into Mormonism. Since you're dead you won't be able to object. And another soul is saved from the fires of hell. Praise the Lord!!! Someone should tell the Jehovah's Witnesses of this approach. It just saves a LOT of time and hurt feelings. Think about it. Rather than go door to door and have people pretend they're not home, slam the door in your face, set their dogs on you or openly mock your "kooky" beliefs, you just wait until AFTER they're dead and convert them anyway. No muss. No fuss. And no expenses for Watchtower pamphlets. All in all it's the perfect approach for the more introverted missionary, or perhaps a missionary who's just tired of trying to outrun the local Rottweiler.


Who could object to such a swell setup? I mean it's a win-win for everyone right? The church gets "converts" and you don't have to explain to the pious young person standing on your porch that no you aren't interested in coming to a Bible reading,  no you aren't giving him any money and no you don't want any literature. 

Well as it turns out there are quite a few people who object to this practice. One of them happens to be Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize Winner and activist. And I think I would object as well. I mean imagine that you are minding your own business and then find out that Mormons are claiming that your deceased relatives converted to Mormonism and are presumably off ruling their own planets in Mormon heaven. Or consider that you're getting up there in age and discover that the Mormons have already calculated the likely time of your demise and are preparing to posthumously convert you to their faith. Wiesel wasn't pleased.

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who has devoted his life to combating intolerance, says Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney"should speak to his own church and say they should stop" performing posthumous proxy baptisms on Jews.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner spoke to The Huffington Post Tuesday soon after HuffPost reported that according to a formerly-Mormon researcher, Helen Radkey, some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had submitted Wiesel's name to a restricted genealogy website as "ready" for posthumous proxy baptism. Radkey found that the name of Wiesel had been submitted to the database for the deceased, from which a separate process for proxy baptism could be initiated. Radkey also said that the names of Wiesel's deceased father and maternal grandfather had been submitted to the site. 

A spokesman for the Mormon Church claimed that the names were simply entered into the database, and none were submitted for baptism, which he described as a separate process. The entry of a living person, he said, was a mistake, and he provided no explanation for the submission of Wiesel's father and maternal grandfather. By Monday the records for the names of Wiesel and his family had been changed to "not available," according to Radkey.

SOURCE

Ouch. Now far be it from me to question anyone's faith. I don't really care what you believe so much as how you behave. But at the very best it's sort of rude and at the worst downright arrogant and kind of creepy to run around claiming you've converted dead people. It's remarkable thoughtless and insensitive to their beliefs and more importantly to the beliefs and feelings of their living relatives. It's a sort of rewriting of history. I knew about this practice but I'm a little surprised that the Mormons are still doing it. Seems like that they would have gotten the message that their missionary outreach needs to be restricted to those who can still say yes or no: that is the living.

But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. After all back in 2007 When asked by Newsweek if he has done baptisms for the dead -- in which Mormons find the names of dead people of all faiths and baptize them, as an LDS spokesperson says, to "open the door" to the highest heaven-- he looked slightly startled and answered, "I have in my life, but I haven't recently". SOURCE

O-KAY. So perhaps the biggest question of the 21st century will not be whether or not America was ready to elect a black man with an African name to the White House but rather if America was ready to send a self-admitted necromancer to the White House. Maybe we'd better vote for Mitt while we have the chance. Otherwise he's just going to wait until we're dead and then claim we voted for him anyway. Yikes. He could be the first President seriously to go after the critical dead demographic. Kennedy made some overtures in 1960 but Romney could really win this under recognized voting bloc.

QUESTIONS

1) Is Wiesel right to be upset? Would you care if this happened to your deceased loved ones?

2) Is this a fair area of discussion or should the media have stayed out of it?

3) Will stories like this have any impact on the primary nomination (or general election should Romney be the nominee)

Pat Robertson thinks GOP too extreme

I rock for Jesus, baby!!!!

You know you have a substance abuse problem when Robert Downey Jr. says he's worried about your drug intake.

You know you have a weight issue when Oprah says you could stand to drop a few pounds.

You know you have an extremist issue when Pat FREAKING Robertson says you've gone too far to the Right.

That's right. Pat FREAKING Robertson, the hateful religious fraud last heard claiming that the Haitian earthquake was punishment for a slave revolt inspired by the devil and that divorcing a spouse with Alzheimers is the right thing to do thinks that the current GOP candidates are slipping too far to the right, and that this will hurt the GOP in the general election.

I believe it was Lyndon Johnson that said, ‘Don’t these people realize if they push me over to an extreme position I’ll lose the election?’” he said. “Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They’re forcing their leaders, the frontrunners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election…They’ve got to stop this! It’s just so counterproductive!

I mean think about this. Pat FREAKING Robertson thinks the GOP candidates are too far to the Right.

This is the man who 

• Had lucrative diamond mining business with former Liberian President and accused war criminal Charles Taylor and former Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
• Agreed with Jerry Falwell that liberals, atheists and feminists had brought on 9-11 as God's Punishment. Robertson explicitly also made his own statement that his God had lifted his protection from the US as a result of engaging in or allowing non-Pat Robertson approved activities.
• Thinks that Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke as God's Punishment for being willing to cede land to the Palestinians.
• Thinks that "gay days" at Disneyworld will bring about God's Punishment
• Said that Hurricane Katrina was likely God's Punishment for US abortion policies.
• Predicted terrorist mass killings in 2007 in the US as, you guessed it, God's Punishment.

And there's plenty plenty more here and here

However the sun shines on a dog's butt every now and again. And even a nutty loon (or is it a loony nut) like Pat FREAKING Robertson may have a point. Perhaps the Republicans would be well advised to listen to the crazy "religious" man in this instance. Because if anyone knows crazy ugly extremism, it's Pat FREAKING Robertson. If you're guzzling down shots at the Crazy Bar and Robertson pulls your coat to whisper, "Hey, you've had enough to drink-let's go", maybe you should step away from the counter and not call for another round. 

QUESTIONS

Do you think Robertson is correct and Republicans are tilting too far to the Right?

Were you aware of Robertson's previous loony statements?
Does this mean the evangelicals may not turn out in force for the eventual Republican nominee?