Penn State abuse is part of America’s child assault that includes the perversion of circumcision

Those of us who have worked so hard to raise awareness of the insidiousness of routine infant circumcision watch the justified outrage at Penn State University related to abuse of underage boys by a former assistant football coach.  Yet, we shake our heads at the American hypocrisy for people to be offended by one kind of horrific abuse of the helpless and defenseless, but cannot see the utter sexual assault that is circumcision.  It both cases, something profound is taken away forever.

Wake up, folks.  If we think we should protect our children from adults’ dirty, stinking torturous ways with our youth and children, let’s be consistent.  Oh, you say, but circumcision has been around soooooo long and our prized, faultless doctors perform it at parents’ behest. And, oh, my gosh, it means a cleaner penis.  Says who?

C’mon, people, circumcision is assault.  Ordering the removal of a healthy, purposeful, sensitive body structure from someone else  – with all the bleeding, screaming, nerve-ripping diminishing of someone’s else’s genitals — it torturous and medically unethical.  Circumcision means less penis. Circumcision means the removal of richly erogenous penile shaft skin.  Circumcision means forever exposing the the penile head, or glans, to open air and clothing to dry out, to keratinize to desensitize. The glans is otherwise an internal, covered structure, kept moist and protected by the foreskin.  Circumcision means one person making a major decision about the body integrity of another that cannot be reversed.     You cannot replace the specialized nerves, the blood vessels and the other unique components of the foreskin, the only truly mobile part of erect penis.

Not the most well-meaning parent has the moral right to have a child’s body reduced to satisfy a cultural, religious or personal choice.  You can’t brand, tattoo, stretch or contort an offspring.  After all, there are universal human rights.  Why should males like I grow up to resent that I was violated — my body changed forever without my consent.  ”Dad and Mom, why weren’t you there to protect me?”  ”Oh, son, we just didn’t know any better at the time,” they ruefully note.  ”There wasn’t any information for us.”

Where now there is and it says the foreskin is there for many purposes and should not be removed, especially for such shallow reasons as “it’s cleaner,” or “the other boys will laugh” or “women like the cut look.”  All tripe and drivel, and parents who buy into that nonsense are to be pitied.

The Penn State episode hits home in another way.   The recently ousted president of Penn State, Dr. Graham Spanier, was a good friend of mine in the mid-1960s when we both studied at Iowa State University.  He was my scholarship chairman when I was president of a men’s dormitory complex and its government called the Towers Residence Association (1967-68).  I occasionally gave Graham rides to downtown Ames where he was a newscaster for a radio station.  We were active in student politics, and we followed each other’s careers. We both later got advanced degrees from Northwestern University.  When Penn State came to the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe in 1997, we were going to get together, but my mother was on her death bed in Iowa and I went back there to see her. She died New Year’s Day and funeral followed. Graham and I never had the chance to reconnect in person.

What does it take to lead people to end cruel and embedded practices?  What does it take for self-evident facts to resonate with people? Why the blindness and ignorance and insistence on continuing to do to others that they would NOT choose for themselves?  The circumcision industry in America has been relentless in trying to make expectant parents believe cutting foreskins is no different than cutting hair or finger nails and that it is done so quickly.  Many suggest the trauma of circumcision leaves a lasting imprint in the mind, and we know how it disrupts breast-feeding.  The first violence visited upon a newborn boy surely raises issues of trust, security and where pain will come from next.

Why cannot parents understand self-determination? Why can’t parents take the time to explore why God put foreskins on all male mammals or that females have their counterpart protective, erogenous structure?  Why do parents think they can improve on God’s handiwork?  The Internet teems with web sites laying out the case against circumcision.  The pro-circumcision woefully try to drum up disease issues, but how many intact males do you know whose foreskins have brought them disease?   Invariably, we hear about someone’s cousin who had a “tight foreskin” that would not retract and caused pain.  Where was the help to inform him to using stretching techniques to make the skin loosen?

If you find Jerry Sandusky’s assault on children perverse and cruel, open your mind to other forms of abuse of the innocent.  Ask yourself: Why should adults use their position of dominance to forever alter the physiology of another person — a young male who wants to experience this wholeness.

Circumcision is a dirty little act that makes millions for the circumcisers.  In America, they get away with it because the public has been duped.  Most of the rest of the civilized world knows better and regards the American practice just more of  our sick, tormented struggles with our sexuality and our  shameful bodies.   Meanwhile, baby boys scream every minute in American hospitals and clinics, and the circumcisers nicely pocket $150 to $300. There is good money in abuse and assault on the helpless in America.  We’re not legally supposed to  perform cosmetic surgery on minors, so how does this sculpting of a child’s penis qualify?  Go figure. Oh, yeah, this is sexually conflicted America.

Go to the site: The Sexually Mutilated Child;  or to Intact America.org;  or NOCIRC.org  or the WholeNetwork.org  for more information.  Or google: “Lawn Griffiths” and “Circumcision” and see some of what I have been writing over the decades against the despicable practice.  Most of all, expectant parents, have the courage and good sense to choose wholeness and genital integrity for your sons.

C’mon, Tempe, get photo enforcement junk off street corners. It’s been cancelled.

OK, City of Tempe, last summer the Tempe City Council voted 4-3 to stop photo radar enforcement in Tempe.

Why are those #@#$ cameras still standing tall at street corners in places like McClintock Drive and Rio Salado Parkway or Rural Road and Southern Avenue? News reports said those machines were shut off July 19 with expiration of the current contract. It was a wise decision: The program, begun in 2007, was a fraud, plus the city, at best, only broke even in getting it established. It had collected $1.8 million but lost a lot in public relations. Photo enforcement is shoddy and lazy. It is Big Brother at its best.

 It’s too easy to put technology all over the landscape and, like land mines, zing whoever makes a mistake. Haul off your crap, Redflix. Get those cameras and in-our-face junk out of our sight. We don’t need any more reminder of how our city leaders got snuckered in a money-making scam gone awry.

The fact that Redflix had filed a lawsuit against Tempe for apparently not getting all the money out of Tempe they said they had coming to it helped convince city council members to drop photo radar. Here hoping Tempe doesn’t get convinced by other high-powered salesman to contract with some other company peddling its technology.

 We don’t need it.

 The state of Arizona’s Department of Public Safety smartly dumped photo enforcement along the highways a year ago. And the company providing it took down their equipment and the ominous warning signs.

So c’mon, Tempe, tell Redflix to speed up hauling off its insidious eyes on the road. May the company never find other naïve city leaders to take the bait and buy into it.

Book on slain prep football coach again showcases my hometown, Parkersburg

My hometown of Parkersburg, Iowa, once again is being showcased, with the release, in August , of the book, “The Sacred Acre: The Ed Thomas Story.”  Written by Indiana author Mark Tabb and published by the giant religious publisher, Zondervan of Grand Rapids, Mich., “The Sacred Acre” tells the the larger-than-life story of legendary high school football coach Ed Thomas, who rallied the town after a devastating tornado only to be gunned down while working with his athletes in the school weight room.

Former Indianapolis Colts Coach Tony Dungy  wrote the forward of the book. “Ed Thomas was a man who lived the gospel, loved his family and believed in doing things the right way,” Dungy wrote. “He taught his players that there are no shortcuts and that you will ultimately be judged not by what you did, but on how you did it.  He was loved, not just by the people of Parkersburg, but by the nation…”

Thomas, who was 2005 NFL National High School Football Coach of the Year, tragically made the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine (Title: “A Good Man Down: The Murder of a Beloved High School Coach”) on July 6, 2009, after one of his former football player fired multiple shots into his head and body.  His assailant, Mark Becker, then 24, now serving life term in prison for first-degree murder, was being treated for paranoid schizophrenia in the days leading up to the murder in the high school weight room on June 24, 2009, carried out in sight of other school athletes.  Becker was  a former football player on Coach Thomas’ team.  A younger brother was on the team at the time of the shooting.

Ironically, Becker had gone on spree of rowdy misconduct days before the shooting and was being treated at Covenant Medical Center in nearby Waterloo.  He terrorized a family in Cedar Falls, led law enforcement on  a high-speed test and had a history of drug misuse.  Parkersburg authorities were miffed that Coventant Medical Center did not inform them that Becker had been released. It would have given them a heads up on his whereabouts, and  they might have had been him under vigilance.    It was the emergency room of Covenant where Thomas was taken by helicopter and later pronounced dead.  (We were in that emergency room seven weeks ago when my brother-in-law went there for medical issues and was hospitalized for four days). The book tells how  the deeply religious Thomas had ministered to and encouraged, as he could, the troubled Becker for years. Mark’s parents were close friends of the Thomases and members, with them, at First Congregational Church in Parkersburg, where my mother had once been a member. Thomas often gave layman services at the church.

Thomas had compiled a record of  292 wins and  84 losses across 34 years at Parkersburg, which  consolidated in 1993 with the  school district to the west, based Aplington. It became the Aplington-Parkersburg School District, with the mascot/nickname of the “Falcons.”  The Aplington Panthers and my Parkersburg Crusaders were fierce rivals all the decades before the merger.  In the fall of 1963, during my senior year at Parkersburg, I stood on the sidelines for football games and kept team statistics of the Crusaders that had gone 4-0 and won the Big Marsh Conference championship.  That duty was a bit of a challenge for me because I was also in the marching band.

The Thomases lost their home in the powerful tornado that wiped out a third of Parkersburg on May 25, 2008.  We had arrived that day from Arizona to Iowa and were at my mother-in-law’s home in Washburn, about 40 miles away, when the tornado hit my hometown.  I went to Parkersburg two days after the calamity and talked about it to a reporter of the Waterloo Courier where I had worked 12 years, the last four as state editor. 

During the storm, the Thomases huddled in their basement as the 205-mph storm smashed their home above them. His wife, Jan, an assistant city clerk, was also part of the Emergency Medical Treatment (EMT) crew with the fire department.  In the end the tornado killed nine in its path that went about two miles north of  a farm my family owns and damaged the hamlet of Sinclair and the town of New Hartford, hometown of  U.S. Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.  The EF5 tornado, the highest in speed, destroyed or severely damaged 400 homes, killed seven in Parkersburg and two in New Hartford and injured about 70.

Ed Thomas became the town’s catalyst for rebuilding Parkersburg, marshalling the forces of hundreds.  Football teams from around the state sent players to help in the clean-up, and all sorts of volunteers, financial aid and other benevolence followed.   The handsome high school, built a decade after I graduated, was too damaged to repair, so a new one was built.  Greatly damaged and full was debris was the  football field that Ed Thomas painstakingly and personally cared for. It  had long been touted  “The Sacred Acre,” despite Thomas’ objections.  

The four players from his team that had gone on to become players of  National Football League teams, Jared DeVries, Aaron Kampman, Brad Meester and Casey Wiegmann, all natives of Parkersburg, returned again and again to Parkersburg after the tornado  to help. Three of them bore  Thomas’ casket to the church for the funeral.

“The only way we win is to look out for one another,” Thomas would tell his players.    After  Thomas’ death, his widow, Jan, sought out their grieving friends, Joan and Dave Becker, parents of Mark, and assured them that neither she nor her sons, Aaron and Todd, were bitter toward them.  The grace the Thomases would show the Beckers helped the town’s healing  and elevated the dignity of the tragedy.  In fact, the following year, the Thomases were the recipients of the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage at the ESPN ESPY awards for their thoughful and forgiving  spirit. 

My little hometown of fewer than 1,000 people has bore so much pain, first the tornado and then the Thomas tragedy. This past June,  I went back for the first time and saw the radical changes in the south part of town. I could hardly get my bearings. The high school is new, and Ed Thomas Field — The Sacred Acre– was being well cared for. 

Publishing of “The Sacred Acre” deeply reminded me of a community that has nurtured my family since 1855 and that has resiliency, grit and incredible people.

Circumcision is too repulsive, injurious, uncivilized to last

The days, months, years and decades march on, and the macabre procedure of circumcision does not end.  How absurd that in an “enlightened society,” the madness goes on, and medically trained humans cut off healthy foreskins. Where are their principles?  Circumcisers are just idiots. They have to be sadists,  or just yes-men doing it only because the money-grubbing hospital would reprimand them if they balked.  Jingle jingle.

How they can  violate the Hippocratic Oath, which essentially states that  “given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good.” It reminds all in the health field that they should consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. The Hippocratic Oath comes into play when discussing use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit.  More than 100 baby boys die annually as a result or trigged by circumcision. And it would be many more if circumcision were universal in the U.S.

There is such an overwhelming amount of literature, videos, testimonies, web sites and speakers out there debunking circumcision  The well-respected Psychology Today has just published a thoughtful article wonderfully taking the notions people have for doing circumcision and ripping them apart. The article, titled “Myths About Circumcision You Likely Believe,”  it takes six of the common excuses and blow-off statements that parents and/or doctors use to try to rationalize cutting off the most sensitive part of a human penis.  The piece by Lillian Dell’Aquila Cannon is part of the “Moral Landscape” blog by Darcia Narvaez, an associate professor of psychology and direct or of the Collaborative for Ethical Education at the University of Notre Dame.  What are those six myths that are countered: “They just cut off a flap of skin,” “It doesn’t hurt the baby,” “My doctor uses anesthetics,” “Even if it’s painful, the baby won’t remember it,” “My baby slept right through it” and “It doesn’t cause the baby longterm harm.”  In a few words, the writer goes right after that tripe.

All of us working for the end of routine infant circumcision watch the battle getting fiercer each day. In some ways, it is getting uglier, but the issue  has been pushed more and more onto the public radar screen. Anything that raises awareness about the insideousnss of circumcision is a good thing, although many goonish parents may be driven to insist even more on circumcision by the fierce opposition and their lame notion we are extreme about wanting to protect our baby boys from the wounds and lifelong impact.  The more you look into circumcision, the more you are repulsed by it.                 

 As social movements and human justice efforts go, we are in the stage where the opponents stop just making fun of us and now move into the anger stage. That is consistent with the famous remarks of Mahatma Ghandi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Thanks to people like actor Russell Crowe, whose  Tweet the past summer against circumcision the past day set off a nice firestorm. Though he was carried away and made some inappropriate comments about Judaism, he courageously got the main message out:  “Circumcision is barbaric and stupid. Who are you to correct nature? Is it real that God requires a donation of foreskin? Babies are perfect.”

Not long ago, Tony Award-winning actor Bill Irwin spoke out against circmcision: “ But at this late point in my life, I’m finally brought to ask: How is it that custom — and economics, for circumcision is a market driven practice — can blind us to this essential question: Why are we wounding our sons at birth?”

The biggest development to stoke the debate was the short lived, but highly publicized effort in San Francisco where intactivists gained enough signatures to put a measure on the city ballot in November that would have banned circumcision of minors if it passed and met legal challenges.  It would have made male genital cutting of those under 18 a misdemeanor subject to fine or jail. Media across the country wrote about it. Virtually every article or newscast contained a Jewish spokesman lambasting it as a violation of their First Amendment freedom of religion.  They argue that, in the unlikely chance that the measure might have passed, it would be immediately challenged in court. It would pit human rights versus freedom to practice religion.  The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) shot themselves in the foot by coming to the defense of Jews and Muslims, totally forgetting the civil liberties of minor males.

 We believe that one’s religious freedom ends where another person’s body begins.  Parents, of course, have limits on what they can do to children’s bodies. Cutting off healthy living structures that have a purpose should not be one of them.   Progressive Jews have already abandoned the bris, subscribing to to Leviticus 19:28:  ”You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.”  Jews who argue their very religion is threatened need to take a breath. How many of their old laws and commandments were abandoned along the way in the march to civility and civilization and enlightenment?  Morever, how can “religious freedom” be declared for parents when the religious freedom of children is not respected?  That boy could grow up rejecting Judaism, but have to bear the scar of it and the impact of  circumcision on his sexuality for the rest of his life.  It’s only a matter of time, I suspect, that researchers will find circumcision a chief cause in America of widespread male erectile disfunction (ED). But the Viagra and Cialis folks surely don’t want that research done.

Parents need to wake up on this issue. Circumicsed males need especially to break the vicious circle, as I did, and not impose on their baby boys what was done to them.  All need to come to know the wonderful workings of the foreskin – how delightful, delicate, moveable, pliable, mechanical it is.  Ugly? Of course, not. If the foreskin is ugly, then so are the folds of the vagina. Check out some of these accurate and informative sites on circumcision and the foreskin: 

• http://www.thewholenetwork.org/
• http:/cirp.org
• http://nocirc.org/
• http://www.drmomma.org/
• http://www.doctorsopposingcircumcision.org/
• http://www.savingpenises.org/
• http://www.intactamerica.org/
• http://www.jewsagainstcircumcision.com/
• http://www.genitalautonomy.eu/
• http://www.icgi.org/
• http://www.circumcisionandhiv.com/
• http://www.arclaw.org/
• http://www.tlctugger.com/
• http://norm-uk.org/

Tempe may finally be getting smart and traveler-friendly on street signage

 Over my 27 years of living in Tempe, I had paid special attention to the city’s signage standards and practices. In my column-writing days, I leveled a flurry of criticisms about over-regulation. The city’s stingy, begrudging rules hurt businesses, organizations and the traveling public. In the past several years, I have been pleased to see some sanity restored.   We are now seeing larger, more creative, more informative signs on the streets and sides of building.  We have seen the city abandon it legalistic, zealously enforced rules on banners and promotional signs. City leaders always would tell me, “Well, we don’t want to look like Mesa with its hand-painted commercial signs standing 15 feet in the air.”

 Of course, the city had long been hypocritical in its rules-setting, variances and allowances for certain businesses. I recall how tight the city was in the 1990s and then dropped all rules when Sun Devil Stadium hosted the 1996 NFL Super Bowl game.  Banners, signage and massive promotional boards were everywhere.   But worse than that was when Tempe Marketplace was developed, and the OK was given to mega-lighted signs for the tenants of the mall along the Red Mountain Freeway and Highway 101.  That row of huge signs can be seen for four miles for night drivers southbound on the 101.  Now I don’t mind having such eye-grapping signage. I just see a double-standard and uneven enforcement.

 My gripe with the city centered on its unimaginative, restrictive ordinance, intended for aesthetics, but what led to postage-stamp signs, hard to see from the street and so limited in information that is didn’t serve merchants.  Strip malls could merely say “Shoes” or  “Electronics” or “Barber.”  There was the old rule that stores could not have more than 24 square feet of sign space, which automatically limited the kinds of crucial information left off, include street numbers.  Height restrictions have meant the signs are at the level of cars. That means challenges of passing a business and finding cars, trucks and buses block them out.  Strip mall often have not had corner directory boards listing all the tenants at that corner. (How many of us have driven through strip malls at all four corners of a major intersection to finally find a merchant?)

 Not so long ago the city cracked down on non-profit groups for their banners and event signs, accompanied by fees. I recall the time the city enforcers taped a violation notice on the door of my church because we had staked up a banner for our Easter services.   Seems we should have paid more than $100 for a permit that would give us up to 14 days in the calendar year to put out banners.  Pretty stingy for a church wanting to tout a number of events.   The city revisions in 2009 and 2010 are more realistic, and the petty enforcements of most banners appear to be gone.

 Interestingly, the city adopted Zoning Ordinance 193 in 1948 to “prohibit intermittent or flashing forms of illumination.”  In 1951, Ordinance 268 restricted placement of billboards to certain industrial or zoning districts to eliminate the popular “Burma Shave” kind of signs. The Design Review Board, one of the first in the nation, was created by an ordinance in 1969, giving a citizen board authority to deal with many issues including on-site signage.  By 1976, the city council addressed sign packages and low-profile free-standing signs. B-O-R-I-N-G!   The push was for uniformity of signs for all tenants in a shopping centers and then in industrial sites.  Stores were limited to one sign per street frontage.  In 1987, more restrictions were set on sign maintenance, non-conforming signs and banners.  Alteration of a sign previously “grandfathered” meant the whole sign had to go.

 City objectives for signs, set in 2005, were to “prevent the chaotic proliferation of signage,” “avoid the visual clutter created by excessive signage,” “promote building-mounted signage” to works with the architecture (but not compatible with trees); and provide the name, identify, product, services and special circumstances.

 I love to see businesses that get around sign rules by parking a truck along the street that serves as a de facto sign itself.

  used to rail against the puny letters of signs put on the face of taller Tempe buildings. The late-Councilman Frank Plenchner once grabbed me by the collar in fury over a column I did reprimanding the city for approval of oh-so-small letters on a Centerpoint bank building. I pointed to it and said that was exactly why the sign ordinance was ridiculous.

 Beyond that, anyone in Tempe who really wants to promote a place or event needs a lesson in lettering.  Shame on businesses that let the city regulate them down to paltry lettering and signs. Shame on folks who do not make yard and patio sale signs that have letters big enough to read for a driver doing 40 mph.  Shame on them for their miserably, unimaginative and informative signs.

 Treat signs as communication for our navigation.  A community that enables its businesses and citizens to carry out smart commerce should be lauded.  Tempe seems finally headed in the right direction.

Dumpster diving should never be a crime

Occasionally, I have witnessed a Tempe police officer confronting a Dumpster diver collecting aluminum cans, which these days can fetch a nifty $1 a pound if you know where to take them to sell. How absurd that cops can —  or would — intercede. That’s especially true these days when poverty is ever more rampant, when unemployment is obscene and when people need to be allowed to carry out what humans have been doing since the beginning of time – talking ownership of what the wasteful waste.So first off, IF Tempe police are harassing aluminum can collectors, they should stop it immediately – and let folks seek to make a living. Never mind they might get cut on a jar or whatever.  I suspect they, like the rag-pickers who live off dumping grounds around the world, know the risks and adjust appropriately. Why should anyone be denied taking ownership of what others discard?

 I penned a “Beyond Belief” blog for the East Valley Tribune on

Though S.F. circumcision ban falters, it has helped educate Americans to reject the cruel practice

It’ so confounding, so bizarre that otherwise caring, thoughtful people see nothing wrong with circumcision.  Can’t they grasp the fundamental right of a child for wholeness — to possess and keep all the structures that God/nature so exquisitely engineered for his body? Where do they come down presupposing Junior won’t want or need his foreskin? Haven’t they learned the role of the foreskin for protection, mobility, sensitivity, pleasure and sexual mechanics?

I have to keep reminding myself that I have been speaking out against it for 40 years and the issue is not yet on the radar screen of most Americans.  They know not. More often than not, they are captives to the tyranny of habit and tradition in condoning the ripoff of the penis. History is full of injustices continuing through centuries, to the astonishment of logic, fairness and outrage. Why does social reform take so long when blatant wrongs are identified generations before?  Ignorance, power and the oppression of tradition resist change.  And here we have a powerful health industry that has snookered generations of parents to OK a perverse and unethical procedure that bring billions of dollars to them. The immobilized victims are  too young to stop it.

All of us in the human rights and social justice movement for the end of circumcision are stinging from the ruling a week ago by a superior court judge in San Francisco who determined  a November ballot proposal to ban circumcision of male children within the city violates a California law that makes the regulation of medical procedures a function of the state and not cities.   Judge Loretta Giorgi ordered the San Francisco elections director to have the measure removed from the ballot.  Earlier in the summer, Lloyd Schofield and his group, “Prohibition of Genital Cutting of Male Minors,” had accumulated more than 12,000 signatures on petitions, far exceeding the 7,163 needed for the ballot. The proposal would make circumcising a minor in the city a misdemeanor offense punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and up to a year in jail.

OK, there is some logic to preventing individual municipalities from deciding what medical practices are acceptable. There could otherwise be a patchwork of regulations like ancient city states. The California Business and Professions Code triumphed here.

But Giorgi’s ruling cannot, and should not, be interpreted as exonerating the heinous, insidious practice of circumcision. It is still a nasty, body-altering act performed on a non-consenting human beings for no significant medical benefit and with risks of permanent penile injury and death.  One estimate put medical deaths annually in the U.S. from circumcision at 229.

After Schofield’s ballot effort was first publicized in the fall of 2010, a howl rose from circumcision defenders.  First were Jews, who argued it directly infringed on their ancient practice of the bris — the ceremonial circumcision of male babies on their eighth day by a mohel. Then there were the defenders of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution who contended that not allowing foreskin cutting violated religious folks the freedom to practice their faith.   Then there were ignorant Christians who still think circumcision is mandated for them because ”circumcision” is in the Bible and Jesus was cut. Add to that the American Civil Liberties Union, which normally follows common sense, but here came to the defense of religionists to the detriment of the rights of the child.  Muslims complained, too, because circumcision is a staunch cultural practice. It is not required by the Quran, though that is often claimed.

The San Francisco measure brought to the American consciousness the human rights issues regarding circumcision for, perhaps, the first time.  Many in the media reported on it. Many in the media had a field day with puns, double entendres and tee-hee comments over why so much fuss could be made about a chunk of skin attached to a guy’s intimate parts. Mainstream media have lacked the judgment or courage to acknowledge that circumcision is medically unethical, just as female genital mutilation is.  They won’t acknowledge that all humans have the universal right to wholeness and safety from intrusive harm.

Most of us are familiar with the famous quote of  Arthur Schopenhauer, which can be applied to how entrenched practices are changed: “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident.”  The San Francisco ballot experience was a combination of the first two stages.  Those who had never before heard the case against circumcision were mostly scoffing, joking and deriding the idea that someone would try to put a stop to America’s most routine surgery.   But the “violently opposed” included the Jewish communty, which has tried to justify their cutting practice since the days of Abraham (of course, adopting a tribal practice no way unique to them). It’s been a deeply contentious issue among Jews themselves, who do not universally circumcise and never have. Jews historically have taught to respect the human body.  The Torah, for examples, notes this is Leviticuls 19:28: “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.”

Several California legislators, alarmed by the San Francisco proposal, rushed to draft a bill in the California State Assembly to protect circumcisions. Meanwhile, a California congressman was working to get a bill adopted by Congress to allow the cutting to continue come what may.

All that aside, circumcision is on its way out. We will see the fulfillment of  Shopenhauer’s statement that truth will weather ridicule and violent opposition to be  deemed self-evident.  Of course, male babies and boys should be left intact.

  Better educated, sophisticated, sensitive parents are rejecting circumcision. They are repulsed, and they buck tradition because they recognize their sons should not be sexually altered to conform to quack medicine.  They recognize that most of the rest of the world — Europe, Asia, Latin America and great parts of Africa — never adopted it and find America’s obsession with a skinless penis some weird cultural fetish.

A Centers for Disease Control study found the rate of circumcision in the U.S. fell from 56 percent to 32.5 percent between 2006 to 2009. Thankfully, here in the American West, the rate is lowest.  It has been helped by the decision by health service departments in 18 states to drop Medicaid coverage of circumcision because it is not medically necessary and is essentially cosmetic surgery.

The days are numbered for circumcision. Those who worked to block the ballot measure in San Francisco should take no comfort.  The are on the wrong side of history. Those seeking to perpetuate male genital mutilation on the helpless for whatever reasons have no case.  Like slavery, child labor,  discrimination against gays, minorities and women and voting inequality, the time is now on the American agenda for ending circumcision. It will happen because of lawsuits, public education, picketing and protests, politics, medical funding cuts and the work by such groups as Mothers Against Circumcsion,  Attorneys for the Rights of the Child,   IntactAmerica.org, NOCIRC.org  and Doctors Opposing Circumcision.

Check out the July 28 protest by Jews opposed to circumcision outside the San Francisco courthouse.  Put the knives down, doctors.  Stop funding circumcisions, insurance companies. Shut down the circumcision rooms, hospitals.  Respect the body integrity of your sons, parents.  Wake up, folks.

My son and grandsons are intact. Yours can be, too.

Enduring six weeks of hosting two grandchildren

I received a second education on young children as two of our four grandchildren stayed with us for six weeks this summer. They otherwise live in Tulsa, Okla.

I kept asking myself how I missed so much – how I was so oblivious — during the 70s and 80s when we raised our two children. So much of this I JUST don’t remember. It seemed easier as parents, even though we were amateurs at child-rearing then.

I don’t remember our own kids being so verbal, so intense, so reactive, so bold.  I don’t remember them always being so hungry.  Xavier was incessantly opening the refrigerator and reconnoitering the contents. “Grandpa, I need food,” the 3-year-old lad announced 200 times.  Minutes after going through peaches and juice, he announced, “I need a hot dog.”

Every subsequent request was for something different.  Typically only part of whatever got eaten, and Grandpa finished up whatever it was – yogurt, peaches in their juice, chicken nuggets, etc.

 His sister, Marissa, opened the refrigerator at 11:10 a.m and declared I want something to eat. I suggested cheese sticks or raw strawberries or yogurt or raspberries or bananas… “I don’t want any of that,” she whined.  But Xavier was pacified with a cheese stick. Finally, Marissa, stared at the cupboard shelves and announces “Cheez-Its” would serve her immediate need.

 I don’t remember so much unloosed screaming and sobs after being told, “No!” and “Not yet?” or “Because I’m the adult and you’re the 5-year-old child.”

They had a love-hate relationship with our in-their-faces Chihauhua, named Chloe, who vacuumed their crumbs and licked their faces, legs and hands. If they weren’t tormenting her, they were trying to get her to do something new and undoglike.

 I pitched the tent in the back yard. The two kids saw it as a delightful daytime novelty like a playhouse, but would not camp in it at night.

  From the toys to the TV, from the DVDs to CDs, from the trips to the stores to the walks to the park, they had more stimuli than anything kids had 30 years ago. There have been tea parties, slumber parties, pizza parties and a day when both grandkids got their fingernails/toenails painted.  Xavier put the same puzzles together 50 times, although several pieces left on the floor were chewed to a pulp by Chloe

 Patty and I had to keep reminding myself that Marissa, 5, and Xavier, 3, are not our children. They were literally on loan. I am more than pleasantly surprised by the nurturing they are getting in far-off Oklahoma.  The receptors in their brains pick up and process everything in their environment – from examining leaves on backyard bushes to separating stones by their colors.  They came seeking fly swatters, made hourly raids on the refrigerator and went through boxes of with colored markers, chalk and stickers.  Amid potty-training for Xavier and indulging Marissa’s joy in playing Taylor Swift’s CD, there are a lot of old and new experiences for them.

Marissa spent hours on the computer playing Disney and Noggin games – protesting whenever an unintended key stroke got her onto something else and not being able to negotiate her return back.

We were wonderfully pleased by what the City of Tempe had to offer: A world-class children’s section in the Tempe Public Library with the delightful preschool storytime; the Tempe Museum with its fake horse, old-fashioned toys and curious displays; wonderful parks with long paths, swings and ducks to feed; a great water splashpad area at Tempe Beach Park and fun, smaller splashpads at places like Hudson and Jaycee parks; and the new aquarium at Arizona Mills Mall. Tempe, you helped us keep the kids occupied.   Along the way, they also tripped to the Phoenix Zoo.            

 It was six weeks of looking after two grandkids who liked to be on the go. They needed to get out of the house to restaurants, stores, malls, and beyond. They thrived in vacation Bible school, relished fireworks, quickly got over their spills and scratches and learned some manners along the way. We can’t count the rolls of paper towels spent on wipe-ups and messes.

 You can indulge them with toys, kids’ meals and the things they impulsively spot in stores.  They gave workouts to our clothes washer, microwave and TV. Our evenings orbited around bath time and calming them down at night to sleep. We lost one of Xavier’s sandal early on, tore the house apart, but never found it. We bought new ones.

I spent those same formative years in a four-room farmhouse down a long driveway, so far from anything so stirring or exciting. We got our first TV when I was nearly 6. I never went to a movie until I was 8. These kids, however, have been zapped by millions more stimuli than I experienced in my sheltered world. It shows up in their intelligence sentences, awareness and spontaneity.

 Patty and I are considering this as an annual undertaking, this hosting grandkids from Oklahoma – if we have enough in our tanks a year from now.

 We also have a granddaughter and grandson in Litchfield Park whom we see regularly.  They are about the same age as their Oklahoma cousins.  Somehow they seem to come from a different tribe. Or maybe we just get them in smaller doses.

We love all of them and marvel at how different each is. We wonder what we can impart in a 42-day stint of influence, adventures, discipline and crazy joy.

Hanging next to the oven in our kitchen are three various decorative plaques. One says, “Grandkids make the world a little softer, a little kinder, a little warmer.” Another says, “God couldn’t be everywhere so he made grandmas.” The last says, “Grandma’s House: Where Memories are Made.”

 

Recalling life in our rural Iowa neighborhood 50 years ago with a party line, country friends

I grew up on an Iowa farm and left it when I went off the college in 1964.  I recently reflected on our rural neighbors and our interative lives together. 

We knew our farm neighbors by the distinct sounds of their Farmalls and their Case tractors, their trucks and combines, climbing the hill past our place. We didn’t even need to look to see who they were. But we did, and we waved like all farm folks waved – a perfunctory raised arm and flap of the hand.

The whines, whirs and rattling of their machines contributed to the rhythm of our countryside. There was a pulse to their regularly passing our place. We always sensed what was different or out of place – who was grinding feed or being visited by a corn salesman. We saw their dogs patrolling or resting beside the well house.

Typically, there were four or five farmsteads in each square mile, and we, especially, knew those with kids. These were neighbors whose kids we grew up with, told our secrets to and hung around with under the black, starry skies of the rural night, with the mosquitoes. We roamed through their barns and woods.

Only a few homes contributed to our one-room country school, Beaver No. 2, carved out of a corner of our farm. Fifteen of us in grades 2 to 8 were left when the state shut down our “neighborhood school” in 1955.

In our patch of Grundy County Iowa, I caught the last of the oat threshing era during the 1950s when the massive clamoring machine was towed from farm to farm in July to separate oats from sheaves that had stood in shocks in the yellow fields. Neighbors were expected to set their days aside and join the threshing crews for a couple weeks, moving from one farm to the next until the circuit was completed.

From time to time, a commercial corn sheller descended on most farms, and neighbors turned out to help and provide grain wagons to capture every kernel a large corn crib could give up. Gravity sent the dried ears into the hopper, while men in the crib used hooked forks to tear the ears loose. Mice scrambled from the crib, escaping across the farmyard if cats didn’t snag them first. In the end, bulging wagon loads of golden shelled corn were hauled to the elevator in town.

As neighbors, we shared fenced lines that were ensnarled by vines and ragweed, willows and sumac. We worked out arrangements with neighbors to split the cost of new barbed wire, steel posts or galvanized fencing. Creeks flowed out of neighbors’ fields and pastures into ours, carrying their dead cornstalks and the water from the tile lines buried in their fields. Meandering creeks laced farms together. Those downstream were gifted with eroded silt from those neighbors. Then massive summer rains created flashfloods that interlocked our farms with robust bodies of water with new shorelines.

High summer winds took down sheds or barns across the countryside. After the storms broke, we’d climb in the pickup and rambled across the countryside to see who had been hit. A third of my hometown was wiped out by a May 2008 tornado with more than 200 mph winds. Six died in the greater area. That day, my family was visiting relatives 35 miles away and would see the impact of nature’s rage a day later. Fields just north of our farm were strewn with shreds of people’s possession.

The tangerine winter sunsets we saw through our grove showcased our neighbors’ barns, sheds and houses. We snapped brilliant photos we thought were prize winners.

For one year, my farmwife mother, a registered nurse, who couldn’t drive was taken daily by my dad to nearby Stout to care for the bedbound father of a woman who lived across the road and her brother who lived just up the road.

 When my twin brother got his pilot’s license at age 16, he lured neighbors to take turns taking flights over their farms, so they could behold their fields and farmsteads from above. He could build up flight hours, and they paid for the plane rental.

Neighbors phoned us when they saw our livestock come up the road after escaping through a bad fence or over tall, frozen snowdrifts. We traded our farm equipment and tools. Sometimes we did their chores when they took a trip. We listened for danger, spread the word about where sons were going to Army basic training and we went to the weddings and funerals of neighbors.

When we had a rural party line (our number was 2296), we picked it up after two long and one short ring. Usually we could hear our neighbors pick up, too, to listen in. bout where sons were going to Army basic training and we went to the weddings and funerals of neighbors. When we had a rural party line (our number was 2296), we picked it up after two long and one short ring. Usually we could hear our neighbors pick up, too, to listen in.

May San Francisco voters ban circumcision of minors and begin end to insidious sexual assault

National and local media today widely circulated the news that San Francisco will have the opportunity in November to vote whether the circumcision of males under age 18 can remain legal.  Passage of it would block doctors from cutting  foreskins from helpless, defenseless, unconsenting baby boys, toddlers, or any male minors.  Voters will essentially be asked whether they believe a minor has the right to self-determination of his body and all its parts.  Do grown-ups really have the right to order a healthy, normal, natural structure to be permanently cut off — no matter what pretext the adult uses to try to justify it?

So the debate begins. It will be robust.  The Jewish community is the first to howl foul. And families where circumcision has been a tradition are offended.  While I would be delighted to see voters approve it and see males protected from genital cutting  just as females are in the U.S., the realist in me tells me that most people lack the sense of  social justice and ethics to see beyond the tyranny of tradition and they lack the compassion to come down on the side of the child.   Opponents say that even if it passed, it would be litigated on grounds of First Amendment freedom of religion (i.e., Jews consider it integral to their faith, even though Judaism has a long history of discarding harsh and cruel practices).

Too many parents and would-be parents will get their dander up, claiming such a law undermines their rights to parenting.  They will repeatedly say that they can do what they darn well please with their children because they have the children’s welfare in mind.  Trouble is they don’t have carte blanche right to do as they want with children.  And just because circumcision has a long history, it doesn’t make it exempt from the list of abuses.

Sadly social movements — even when the injustice is so self-apparent — have to endure long waits to get traction.   Conservatives wanting to preserve the status quo are slow in understanding rights and gaining enlightenment.  We know about slavery, marginalization of women, child labor, seven-day workweeks, pollution, etc.  Even when the injustices have been exposed and there can be no doubt of the wrongness, whole blocs of people didn’t yield without a fight.

Even if this measure loses in November, the accompanying debate will surely save a lot more baby boys from genital cutting because some parents and guardians will have been informed for the first time of the perversion that is circumcision, how it is a de facto form of sexual assault and that it has no endorsement of medical societies around the world.  All too many parents don’t question circumcision and almost think it is standard operating procedure when a male is born in a family. That mindlessness must end.

If it loses this time, a ban on circumcision will come in time through lawsuits, greater education, shaming the $1 billion circumcision industry and greater media attention to those babies who die from circumcisions gone very wrong.   That females are protected from having parts of their genitalia cut off in America, but males are not protected,  is a blatant double standard and evidence there is not equal treatment under the law.    A few more big lawsuits against doctors and hospitals will help.  

The reality is that the foreskin belongs there as part of male genitalia.  Long human history shows that  males have survived and flourished with foreskins. That debunks the fear-mongers who try to make a case that the structure is unhealthy.  Intact America is one of numerous groups that are working to educate Americans at the same time the circumcisers ramp up their marketing of baby-cutting.

May the forces to end circumcision be able to mount their case in the fierce that is inevitable in San Francisco. Certainly, the medical industry and Jewish community will have the resources to try to perpetuate baby cutting.  We have already gotten 18 states to end Medicaid coverage of circumcision because states don’t want to pay for such cosmetic surgeries that are unnecessary and  lack formal support of medical groups.

Look for other communities to seek their own elections.  Our hope is that parents come to their senses and recognize the body rights of their sons to be whole, complete and fully sexually functional.