On the Cutting Edge of Sophistry

There’s nothing like circumcision to spark a conversation. I once did a radio show with Rabbi Daniel Lapin in which one of the guests was a mohel (rabbi who performed circumcisions) from Argentina (I’ve led a rich and varied life). Rabbi Lapin had all sorts of stuff he wanted to talk about, but the only thing callers wanted to discuss was the endlessly fascinating topic of circumcision. It got numbing after a while, but one remark stood out: the mohel remarked, “I don’t take tips.” Gotta love Jewish humor.

Anyway, I don’t have a lot to add to the whole circumcision thing. Some people argue it’s a little better for boys in the long run, based on STD stats and such like. Other, like me, don’t see much point to it and figure a better prophylactic is to raise your boys so that they aren’t like to catch STDs. My only caveat to that is to add, “If your zeal against circumcision is such that you start calling it “mutilation” and demanding that it be outlawed, you should bear in mind that you are calling for persecution of Jews, since their religion *demands* circumcision and I, for one, am not going to back you up on your fanaticism.”

Naturally, this calls forth a standard response from a certain sort of reader, namely, the kind of guy who will take anything you say on any subject from oriental shrubbery to trout fishing in America and try to turn it into a “gotcha” in justification of torture:

“Catholics Against Circumcision” argue that male circumcision is not medically necessary and therefore is “mutilation.” The Church’s teaching on bodily integrity and its prohibition on mutilation is set out in the catechism, right next to the prohibition on torture.

Unlike the case with torture, however, Mark suggests that “mutilation” is somehow not clear. Is he playing definitional games? Shouldn’t he just adopt the broadest possible reading of “mutilation” so that no infant boy would ever be mutilated?

The suggestion that Catholics should avoid calling mutilation by its right name so as to avoid giving offense to Jews sounds suspiciously like a consequentialist argument. Of course we should have interfaith conversations with our Jewish brothers and sisters, but we needn’t shrink from the Church’s teaching on mutilation to do so.

This is what is known as “a reach”.

Here’s the deal. The fact that Catholics Against Circumcision call circumcision “mutilation” is as significant as the fact that Catholic Vegans call meat “murder”. Their sayin’ so don’t make it so.

Of course, torture defenders make exactly the same argument in reverse–preposterously–about techniques which have actually resulted in the *death* of detainees: they claim that every specific instance of bleedin’ obvious torture is render completely ambiguous by the fact that *some* “enhanced interrogation” techniques are difficult to unambigously define. In short, they say that since “sleep deprivation” may or may not be torture, it’s impossible to know if cold cells, waterboarding, or strappado are torture, even if prisoner die from them. That’s the little clue which gives away the game. For contrary to what is stated above, I do not claim that what constitutes torture is “always clear”. Instead I have virtually always confined my discussion to examples of torture which nobody in his five wits (except a dedicated torture apologist) could deny are torture.

So the real analogy is this: If somebody were to say, “Hey! Jews circumcise their sons! And that’s not mutilation. So if I castrate a detainee, I’m just not convinced that’s really “mutilation” either! Golly! It’s sooooooo confusing!” you would have something that resembles the arguments of torture defenders–arguments I regard as contemptible sophistry.

As has already been ably demonstrated (by yet another torture defender), a mere physical evil is not necessarily a moral evil. So sticking knives into somebody may or may not be intrinsically immoral depending on whether you mean to murder them or cure them of appendicitis. Circumcision is likewise not obviously and unambiguously “mutilation” if done for medical reasons or out of perceived obedience to God and love of one’s son. That, by the way, is also why SERE training (to endure the torture of waterboarding) is not torture. It does not have, as its goal, the reduction of the person to an object and his deliberate dehumanization.

Weird how hard people will struggle to defend the indefensible.