This is anti-Semitism

They call themselves “intactivists,” which is a much more polite term than the ones that have sprung to my mind. (One such term, unsuitable for a family religion blog, is especially apropos.) But beyond the compounded epithets that have come to me since first hearing about this legislation, I’ve been wondering just why I’ve been so upset by it. And then I saw the comic book and knew.

This is anti-Semitism. And people of good will need to throw a flag here.

I went to college during the early ‘90s, the height of the political-correctness craze. I have known for my entire adult life a world of political discourse in which name-calling (”racist,” “homophobe,” “socialist”) crowds out rational debate, and seems to those calling the names to constitute the beginning, middle and end of their argument.

Beyond impeding good citizenship such rhetorical excesses serve to cheapen terms that will bear tremendous force if they are used judiciously. Anti-Semitism is one of these terms. And it applies here. Its overuse in other situations may attenuate its force in this one, which is a shame. But it is far less shameful than the anti-circumcision movement.

No fair reader of the comic in question can see it as anything other than anti-Semitic. The blond-haired, blue-eyed hero confronts villains like “Monster Mohel,” laments the fact that “all of the well connected doctors and lawyers” [folks, that’s code for “Jews”] are opposed to the anti-circumcision movement, and steals a child from his parents in order to have him raised in an “intactivist” commune by impossibly proportioned beauties.

This is the fantasy world of the anti-circumcision movement: a realm where the beautiful and enlightened protect the next generation from the benighted barbarism of their lessers. Even if they are the parents of the children in question.

Even if you put the anti-Semitism to the side, it’s a worldview obnoxious at best. We, the superior, will feel free to impose our will on the unwashed masses. Against their will, if need be. By any means necessary, including violent ones. Kidnapping is a virtue if it protects the precious foreskin.

The truth is that all children are subjected to a host of violations by their parents. (And where would psychology and literature be without them?) Some are religious, some ideological, some cultural, some simply clumsy.

My own upbringing was in the liberal Protestantism of my forebears. I collected door-to-door for UNICEF as devotional activity. I attended a week-long “peace camp” at which I was taught meditative techniques. I was instructed in the virtues of boycotting certain brands of chocolate chips. I sat with Carter-amnestied draft dodgers around a campfire singing Pete Seeger songs and “Kumbaya” without the barest trace of irony. I learned the convoluted and thoroughly unimportant history of one of the “United” denominations and regurgitated it, along with the Apostles’ Creed, to prove myself worth of confirmation.

I played in handbell choirs.

For me the scars have healed, mostly, though I still break out in a cold sweat when an issue of the Christian Century appears in my mailbox. My point is that each of us will be subjected by our parents to formative experiences that we may one day understand to be formative in a negative sense. But it is the privilege of parenthood to engage in that formation.

There are neighbors of mine for whom their identity is irretrievably bound up in the practice of circumcision. In the book of Exodus God is about to kill his good friend Moses for being slow to obey this commandment for his own son (Ex. 4:24-26). Those who would prohibit circumcision are in effect telling my Jewish neighbors that they cannot be Jewish.

As a fellow citizen, I find this unbearable. As I teach my own children about the fundamental values of our nation, I am struck once again by the power of our First Amendment’s guarantee against the prohibition of the free exercise of religion. More and more I see the importance of protecting religion from governmental intrusion, be it well-intentioned or otherwise.

And in this case, I have to say it’s otherwise. This week a Jewish friend reminded me of Leviticus 19:17, which commands, “You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.” For the sake of my older brothers and sisters, I would reprove my knobbish neighbors in San Francisco.

Jason Poling  | Jun 10, 2011 10:01 AM