Now Is Not the Time
Posted on | February 16, 2010 | 18 Comments
I really appreciate people who come forward with comments and clarifications on my blogs about circumcision. They very much help me get my arms around this issue which to me seems so simple (stop cutting anything off of anybody), but to many is so complex and multi-layered.
I claimed in an earlier blog that it would be pointless to write US legislators about female circumcision because it’s already illegal. To this, I got a response which correctly pointed out that you could encourage your legislators to increase the statute of limitations such that individuals could not escape justice just because x number of years had passed. This is true. Illegal female cutting might not be discovered until years after the fact, so extending the statute of limitations would be logical. I agree with that point. I don’t know anyone who is against male genital cutting who wouldn’t agree. Anti-male circumcision folks are simply against genital cutting, whatever its incarnation. I wish I could say the same for all opponents of female genital cutting.
Unless I’m misreading, my commenter finds this extension of the statute of limitations on the criminalization of female circumcision to be infinitely more important than even the smallest step taken to limit male circumcision, which is not merely legal but on the verge of being officially encouraged by the US medical establishment. The argument I inferred from his comment was: take steps to eliminate all female circumcision first and only then are you morally justified in talking about male circumcision. The whole thing reminded me of the history surrounding the passage of the 14th amendment. And several comments from readers made this connection as well, so since a bunch of us were thinking in the same direction, I thought I’d discuss it.
Sorry for those who know all this, but… in the leadup to the Civil War, the women’s movement grew up out of the abolitionist movement. While attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were miffed, to say the least when they were sat in the observers gallery instead of being granted to right to speak in the conference. This became a eureka moment for the two women, who decided that while slavery was indeed a grave concern, something also had to be done about this “ladies should shut up” thing. The Seneka Falls meeting happened eight years later and the rest of the US suffrage movement followed.
After the war, when the 14th amendment was being drafted, we got incredibly close to putting real teeth into that amendment by providing for universal adult suffrage for all persons born in the US. But we dropped the ball. Abolitionists convinced the advocates of female suffrage to allow the increase in political franchise to proceed stepwise. The argument being: First, let’s correct this colossal injustice done to former slaves (even though it was only for half of the former slaves), then we will totally support your bid for female suffrage. (Really, trust us, we’ll be right there marching beside you.) But for now, the fact that women don’t have the vote is categorically less important than the fact that black men don’t have it.
In other words: Now is just not the time.
How did that strategy turn out? First off, the abolitionists completely abandoned the suffragist movement. They never cared one bit about it. (Beyond just ignoring the issue, some abolitionists spent a great deal of energy ruining early feminists. I’m thinking of the Beechers and their treatment of Woodhull.)
Female suffrage didn’t happen until fifty years later when the 19th amendment was adopted in 1920, and how did those old abolitionists do in the meantime with their strategy of ensuring black male suffrage first? It was a total failure. After Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws deprived black men of the right to vote and that stood until the 1960s. I have always wondered what would have happened if the 14th amendment had been written fully, had enfranchised all US-born and naturalized adults, men and women. Maybe, just maybe, the real enfranchisement of all Americans would have disallowed the amendment from being turned into such a farce. (The amendment was used by corporate lawyers in the late 1800s to give corporations the rights of human beings. That started the big money scandals and made the bed for corporations having the kind of free reign they do today.)
The suffrage issue turned out to be simple: Until you provide for universal suffrage, it’s going to be business as usual, period. The circumcision issue seems to me quite similar: There are many people like my reader who are horrified by female circumcision and relatively indifferent to or maybe even for male circumcision, to the extent that they believe that the anti-male circumcision folks should shut up until the statute of limitations for female circumcisionists has been increased. But is there an endpoint to this kind of thinking? Won’t someone else want to increase penalties or to mandate jail time and, when we’re done passing harsher and harsher laws against people who get the wrong gender of infant under their knives, there’s always the need to fund enforcement, so let’s spent a half-million dollars on enforcement and seriously, once we’re done completely and entirely eradicating female circumcision, it will be your turn and we’ll be right behind you on your male circumcision thing.
Not only am I not going to fall for that one, but I see things much more simply. Much like we found out that we are either a society that enfranchised its citizens or didn’t, on on the voting issue, we are either a society that thinks it’s OK to take an infant and snip off parts of its genitals or we are a society that doesn’t think that’s OK. Period. Americans can write a hundred laws against female circumcision. Those laws don’t change the fact that we are a genital cutting society and that being a genital cutting society makes it OK to be a genital cutting society.
Just like the abolitionists did not achieve any kind of real victory until years after women had been brought into the ranks of enfranchised Americans, I do not believe that anti-female circumcisionists will achieve the victory they desire until we recognize that boys as well as girls deserve a full sexual life with all the genitals they are born with.
In the movement towards genital integrity in this country, we are floating in that murky moral sea where true enfranchisement floated between 1868 and 1920. I look forward to 1920.
[As a last note, I'd like to include an insight provided by a commenter to my last blog on circumcision, Greg H, who points out that the laws protecting only women under 18 from genital cutting are a clear violation of the equal protection clause.]
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18 Responses to “Now Is Not the Time”
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February 17th, 2010 @ 5:22 am
It won’t pass, but legislation to give boys the same protection as girls will be discussed in two weeks.
After years of fighting to keep the Massachusetts MGM (Male Genital Mutilation) bill alive, the bill will finally be heard by the committee at a public hearing on March 2nd, at 1 PM in Room A-1 of the State House. If made into law, this bill will make MALE CIRCUMCISION for anyone under 18 for non-medical reasons ILLEGAL (as it is for FEMALES!)
This is a major accomplishment for MGM bill and men’s rights to choose circumcision (or not) for themselves!
February 17th, 2010 @ 6:48 am
You have it right: Females are not safe where males are not.
February 17th, 2010 @ 6:55 am
I have always wondered what would have happened if the 14th amendment had been written fully, had enfranchised all US-born and naturalized adults, men and women.
It may never have passed at all. Every massive social movement has its own context, of course (for example, the Civil war made the 14th Amendment possible in the first place, but I’d also argue Lincoln may have been more responsible for the century of “soft” slavery that followed, more than any omission of women’s suffrage from the 14th was), but in most cases, I think careful incrementalism is flatly essential to any crusade for equal rights.
Take the recent high profile campaigns for marriage equality: gay couples demanded the right to marry in California, and failed. So the new strategy was to demand the rihgt to marry in Maine, which failed. New strategy? Same thing in New York. Fail. Then the same thing in New Jersey. Fail. If they’d focussed that energy on getting civil unions in on-the-fence states, they could easily have four wins under their belts, which is a much better step toward full equality than four flat demands for full equality _right_now_ than four failures.
Hell, I have as much moral right to marry both of my partners as a gay man has to marry his. But if I was in a position to make sure poly marriage equality was included on every proposed gay marriage bill, do you think I’d be helping or hurting those bills? Do you think I’d honestly be getting myself closer to plural marriage? Or should I let the gay rights movement run its course so that I have something to build on, much like gay marriage equality can build on the abolition of antimiscegenation laws?
As an example that’s clearer to many, examining the evidence shows pretty clearly that, all (very reasonable) assumptions aside, background checks and other restrictions on guns do nothing to reduce violent crime and murder rates. And fully-automatic firearms, though they (very reasonably) scare the crap out of people, aren’t actually significantly more dangerous in real life than normal civilian semiauto firearms. The laws we have don’t actually help anybody and are a burden on a Constitutional right; that makes them unjust laws. Now, if I’m a gun rights advocate, which strategy is more likely to get me what I want in the long run: bringing the worst states’ gun laws more in line with the standard, then trying to eliminate the biggest problems with the background check system, then trying to abolish that system, then trying to open the machine gun registry, allowing time between each step for people to see that the sky hasn’t fallen; or coming out tomorrow and saying “gun control laws are unjust, so tell your Congressman to vote for my bill to allow over the counter machine gun sales at the hardware store”?
It sucks, but very often being right just ain’t good enough.
All this is a bit tangential to your point about circumcision. The commenter didn’t seem to be saying that anti-FGM laws shouldn’t ban all circumcision; she seemed to be saying you can’t even waste energy _talking_ about male circumcision in the shadow of the monumentally more important female version, which is more than a little silly. And I’m pretty confident that we have effectively universal public and legal disapproval of female circumcision. It’s not like there’re many more building blocks to pull out of that box.
February 17th, 2010 @ 6:56 am
Damn narrow columns, makin’ my comments look enormouser!
February 17th, 2010 @ 7:56 am
Don’t you mean “voting” issue in this sentence: “Much like we found out that we are either a society that enfranchised its citizens or didn’t, on the cutting issue…” ?
February 17th, 2010 @ 12:40 pm
Thanks. I updated with an edit.
February 17th, 2010 @ 12:52 pm
What an incredibly thoughtful comment. Thank you so much. Revisionist fantasies about what might have happened in history are always tricky. I don’t mean to represent that I think a 14th Amendment that included everyone would have made the late 1800s a rose garden. There probably would have been Jane Crow laws alongside the Jim Crows, but I do think it’s safe to call the incremental effort to increase the franchise a failure.
Having said that, yes, being right isn’t good enough at all and the debate between incrementalism vs. more thorough change has to be made case-by-case. You’ve brought up two cases where the argument for incrementalism is quite strong.
Thanks again.
Adrian
February 17th, 2010 @ 1:13 pm
Brilliant and congrats to Massachusetts for being the first to even consider such a law.
February 17th, 2010 @ 5:31 pm
Revisionist fantasies about what might have happened in history are always tricky…
…And we tend to project way too much of what we _want_ to have happened onto our alternate histories; it’s not like anybody can _check_.
I think there’s a strong case to be made that racial discrimination was on its way out in the South before the Civil War. There were far more abolitionists in the South than in the North, and while Southern whites lived and worked alongside blacks, Northerners largely viewed them as outsiders who came in and took their jobs. And since only the wealthiest minority used slave labor in quantity, it didn’t have much popular support in the South. Even Jefferson Davis predicted slavery would die out in his lifetime.
But we both know Americans. Nothing makes us put on our stubborn-pants quite like outsiders coming in and trying to force their lifestyles on us. The Civil War being the largest lifestyle imposition in the history of the Union, it seems obvious to me that it created most of the resentment we saw for the next hundred years… But how much of that is _my_ general distrust of government and desire for them to leave me the hell alone?
… the debate between incrementalism vs. more thorough change has to be made case-by-case.
I think there’s a lifecycle for social movements. Sign-waving, slogan-shouting, and flat demands for justice belong in the stop-turning-dogs-and-firehoses-on-me stage. The I’m-basically-free-but-face-some-discrimination stage is where you need incremental steps. Of course, deciding which stage you’re in requires case-by-case judgment.
February 17th, 2010 @ 8:47 pm
Thanks for another fantastic column on this issue. We need to continually explain the disparity in perception between male and female genital cutting. And thanks for mentioning my comment from your last blog. Keep up the great work!
February 18th, 2010 @ 3:38 pm
I’d like to comment on your addendum. It is a clear violation of the equal protection clause because all forms of FGM are prohibited without regard to reason or degree of harm.
There could also be a Title VI violation if a hospital receiving government funding refuses cultural/religious female circumcision of similar degree to male circumcision.
There was an interesting bit on this, are you familiar with the Seattle Compromise?
http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?47+Duke+L.+J.+717
February 18th, 2010 @ 7:18 pm
What a great link, I’m part way through it. Thanks for pointing to it.
February 18th, 2010 @ 8:48 pm
I just wanted to point out that there’s a minor flaw in including California in the otherwise apt argument involving marriage equality (I’m not as familiar with the other states’ votes) People tend to forget that for the Prop 8 Ca voted on, a “Yes” would modify the state constitution to define marriage to be only between one man & one woman. A “No” on Prop 8 would not approve the constitutional amendment. In effect, the majority of Californians voted to change a document whose purpose is to grant rights into one that now curtails rights for some of its citizens-a terrifying prospect in and of itself.
February 18th, 2010 @ 9:00 pm
Very good point. That is exactly right. And terrifying, as you say that we’ve dirtied a constitution with such a low mob sentiment. A shameful (or should I say another shameful) proposition passed by the people of CA. I’m not at all a fan of the prop system. Thanks for the comment. Most of the states have been passing propositions and laws opposing gay marriage. There have been a few failed attempts to go the other direction. I’m not completely boned up on the politics.
Thanks for commenting.
February 19th, 2010 @ 6:14 am
Which demonstrates how insane the California system is. We _know_ straight-out Democracy deoesn’t work. We have a republic system because we _know_ tyrrany of the majority invariably happens when decisions are made by straight popular vote, and that democracy needs to be tempered with representative government and binding constitutions if liberty is to be preserved.
So who on earth thought it was a good idea to let the people directly amend their state constitution with a 51% majority on a referendum?
Oy.
February 19th, 2010 @ 8:03 am
I just finished reading Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, by Machiavelli. I found out that it was the book our constitution is based on, so I thought that, as a good citizen, I should check it out. He is quite critical of the democracy as a tool for the tyranny of the majority, like you said, and equally critical of the empire that followed Caesar. Focusing instead on the virtue of the republic that fell in between. Really amazing book. Can’t recommend it enough.
February 19th, 2010 @ 12:13 pm
I’m terribly behind on my good-citizen reading. Next up, I think, is Locke’s Second treatise on Government. You’ve just put Machiavelli on the list, though; I admit I’d pigeonholed him up till now because of The Prince.
February 19th, 2010 @ 3:42 pm
Well I had pigeonholed him too, re: The Prince and then about a year ago, I listened to a Great Courses series about Machiavelli and most of it covered the Discourses, so I put it on my list. You will love it. The Locke is a good idea too. I’m currently on a Jan Patocka kick. Very interesting guy. Those philosophers from behind the iron curtain are amazing. They saw tyranny and totalitarianism so close-up that their worldviews seem startling to my relatively naive western perspective.