Circumcision: Crossing a Line?

From a web discussion:

Do you maintain that you may do anything you want to your children because they are "yours"? Starve them? Amputate them? If there was a cause? Or is it better if there is not a cause? Deny them education? Force them to work to support the family? Where do you draw the lines? Or need there even be lines drawn? But if there are, who or what draws them, and how do we agree?

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How my children are raised are none of your business, just like I have no say in how you raise your own children. That includes decisions such as vaccinations, circumcision, what they are fed, how they are clothed. Stop there and dont start insinuations such as I can do anything to them if I want. Your interest in another person's circumcision status goes over the line!

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What is this "line" of which you speak? This is the first I've heard of it. If you teach your children that it's okay to steal, or to assault others, especially if others are "wrong", or if they are of the "wrong" race, gender, or religion, then your children have to live in a society with my children and I have a problem with that.

How they are fed? How they are clothed? You may be okay with sending your children out of the house naked, but others might have a problem with this. I think those people should lighten up, but do you not think they have a right to draw some lines there? Unhealthy food? Really?

Check out Matthew 5:30 and Mark 9:43 in the Christian Bible and see if this is a "valid" way of surgically altering your children and if people whole have a right to do it (apparently it is a common form of self-mutilation in emergency rooms, according to a nurse friend of mine). If not, then why is circumcision okay? Is it okay to DENY children treatments that doctors say they need? Vaccinations are a valid question. I would suggest that vaccinations may be good medicine, and that circumcision is bad fake-medicine, and US medical science confusing the two has undermined their credibility as the fifth estate.

Societies and governments, not just religions and parents, determine all the time the details how how children shall be brought up. One could argue it's one of their primary functions.

So, please, spare me your little exclamation marks and affected indignation. The proper way to raise children is a valid topic of public discussion, and your affected injection of hysterics doesn't help anybody. This is a Web forum, for G*d's sake -- if you have a silly and wrong viewpoint, thousands are going to read it and others are going to question it. If you can't defend your position as though you have an adult education, then maybe it's not a good position after all, and you can learn something.

And yes, it still sounds like you ARE maintaining that you can do whatever you like to and with your children (circumcision is just one example of this), and I question that viewpoint. Society and other people and the government taking SOME responsibility in all of our children and SOME hand in their upbringing, and in some cases, e.g., unfit or missing parents, taking ALL of it, seems to me a valid and vital policy. Perhaps you disagree? Perhaps you could paint us a picture of a world in which that's NOT the case?