The ACLU of Northern California filed a court brief Friday supporting an effort to block a ballot measure that would ban juvenile male circumcision in San Francisco.The friend of the court brief bolsters the arguments of a coalition of Jews and Muslims who filed suit in June asking a judge to invalidate the controversial measure headed for the Nov. 8 ballot.
The lead supporter of the circumcision ban characterizes the procedure as “genital mutilation that is unnecessary, extremely painful and even dangerous,” the Associated Press reported.
The ballot measure would make the circumcision of a male younger than 18 years old a misdemeanor carrying up to $1,000 in fines or a year in jail. There would be no religious exemption to the ban, even though Jewish and Muslim followers consider circumcision part of their religion.
The move flies in the face of mainstream practices. The New York Times has reported that 80 percent of U.S. males are circumcised.
A group seeking to get the ban off the ballot cites a number of mainstream sources, including Harvard and UC San Francisco physicians, saying the procedure can stem the spread of AIDS and should be based on parental choice.
In the brief filed Friday, the ACLU argues that state law bans any city or county from passing a law that restricts a licensed medical professional from performing “any procedure that falls within the professionally recognized scope of practice of that licensee.”
In other words, no city authority can stop a doctor from doing things that doctors normally do.
The proposal is blatantly anti-Semitic, as Yaakov Kirschen explains at The Moderate Voice:
A bill to ban circumcision of all males under the age of 18 will be on the ballot in San Francisco this November. This is alarming because circumcision of all males is the single most basic ritual of Judaism. Banning circumcision is a direct attack on the practice of Judaism, even if it is presented as having other motives. In fact, history shows us that viral anti-Semitism always comes to town in disguise, usually portraying its motives as a need to protect innocent victims from demonic Jews.
In the past, violent lynch mob pogrom attacks on Jews and Judaism were launched to protect the peasants and townsfolk from Jews who had “poisoned the wells.” The Nazis were just trying to protect racial purity. More recently, Jew-hatred has been packaged as an attempt to protect the “Palestinian” natives from the evil colonialist Jewish State, and now, in 21st century California, the attack on Judaism is being promoted as protecting Jewish babies from their demonic Jewish parents.
A second characteristic of the behavioral virus we call anti-Semitism is its compulsive use of cartoons in spreading its libels. Anti-Semitic movements from Nazism to Fascism to Stalinism to contemporary Islamism all share a surprisingly intensive use of anti-Semitic cartoons in their campaigns. And so it is with the framers of the anti-circumcision bill.
The bill was written by a private non-profit organization based in San Diego, California with chapters in sixteen states. It is led by someone named Matthew Hess. Their goal is a nation-wide ban on the practice of circumcision and, sure enough, Matthew just could not resist the compulsion to draw those standard Nazi blood-libel caricatures of fiendish Rabbis sacrificing innocent babies. Hess, to push his campaign for the anti-circumcision bill, wrote and edited a propagandizing comic book called Foreskinman. The work is incredibly rich in Nazi ideology and filled with vile anti-Semitic imagery. The shockingly blatant anti-Semitism of the piece was so obvious that, in response, the woman who had been a proponent of putting the same bill onto the ballot in Santa Monica has now withdrawn the measure from consideration.
