from the article:
"...The movement rearing its head in San Francisco is part of a larger campaign throughout the United States and Europe attempting to criminalize the practice of circumcision. While there is ample medical evidence that circumcision is linked to lower rates of penile cancer, thrush infections, balanitis (inflammation of the glans), posthitis and phimosis (two other severe inflammatory conditions), sexual dysfunction, and a reduction in HIV/AIDS and Human Papilloma Virus (HPV, which is linked to sexually-transmitted cervical cancer) transmission rates (in African and other developing societies) as well as improved hygiene, anti-circumcision activists argue that the circumcision of minors ought to be outlawed because a child cannot make a conscious decision as to whether or not they can consent to such a procedure."
"The anti-circumcision movement also has strong roots in Soviet tyranny. Circumcision for religious purposes was banned in the Soviet Union in 1924, just as is currently being proposed in San Francisco. In their effort to obliterate all traditional religious observance, the Soviet NKVD (and later, the KGB), would arrest and put on trial those religious Jews who chose to have their sons circumcised on the eighth day after birth, in accordance with the Jewish understanding of Genesis 17: 9-14, where Abraham was commanded by God to circumcise himself, his son Ishmael, and the men of Israel. The Soviets, of course, also outlawed infant baptism, which, like circumcision, is a religious initiatory ritual, on the grounds that it is “abusive” for parents to “impose” their religious beliefs on their non-consenting children. Under these extreme totalitarian “nanny state” conditions, those who practiced circumcision were subject to torture and forced labor in the Siberian gulags, just as under the San Francisco ballot proposal, parents who choose to practice their faith would be subject to years of imprisonment, loss of their children to the clutches of the state, and/or heavy fines."
