The Circumcision of minors without absolute medical necessity should be banned

How then is it any different? Circumcision destroys 75% of a males ability to feel pleasure, {1} this is most certainly the moral equivalent to Female Genital Mutilation. With this argument, PRO not only shows the weakness of his own argument but the utter lack of proof to back up his argument.He cites "www.avoiceformen.com", a website which appears to lack any and all academic or journalistic accreditations or methodology. The specific article is posted by a member of an anti-circumcision coalition. This should already ring alarm bells, that Pro is forced to rely on the most biased sources available. The specific article cites a supposed study without ever actually linking to it, mentioning the name of the study or mentioning who wrote it. All we know is that it is supposedly new and in the British Journal of Urology International. However when we look in the British Journal of Urology International for the month this article was published (July 2013) plus a month either side[1], there is no such study.In fact the only circumcision related content is a letter about a study supporting my point of view! [2] This is especialyl notable because it's a meta-study, aka a study of studies where it collates all the available studies on a subject and reviews the data as a whole to give an overall view of what the research shows. So rather than cherrypicking one bad study which happens to prove your point of view as many people this would do, this shows us what the scientific consensus as a whole is on the subject and it supports me.Not only is Pro relying on fake news, but he's once again shot himself in the foot and tried to reference sources (albeit this time two steps removed) which prove him wrong.This is clearly false- removing half of a persons erogenous tissue as well as the fraenulum and the rigid band, THE most sensitive parts of the male genitalia, is obviously going to affect penile sensitivity. Except so far these only constituse" half of a person's erogenous tissue" and "THE most sensitive parts of the male genitalia" in your head and despite this being "obvious" you can't seem to present any proof.Even if you hadn't destroyed any confidence in your opinion due to the multiple false claims you've made which have proven to be wrong and you have had to stop responding to as they've indefensible, the burden of proof is on you to back up your claims.No one doubted that FGM was horrible, but honest to the non-existent God, MGM has a number of horrible side effects as well- and actually shares the majority of these side effects. I have provided an academic study evaluating the effects of male circumcision and showing that these do not occur [3] in male circumcision and another to show they do occur in women [4]. To counter this you provide absolutely nothing. No logic, no evidence.Unless you can provide anything to actually back up your claims, there is no reason to consider your side of the argument as significant because all the evidence shows male circumcision is really inconsequential.Yes, I am well aware that the WHO holds a double standard in regards to Male and Female Genital Mutilation- with regards to this, they completely ignore the fact that Female Genital Mutilation also reduces the chances of HIV. {2}Except Female Fenital Mutulation doesn't reduce the chances of HIV and your source doesn't say that it does. It in fact specifically says that "causality was not established during this study", points our several flaws in its own methodology and recommends further research to look into this[5]. Did you just grab the first thing that came up in a google search without reading it?Either way, I don't see how this justifies anything- if you cut off your whole penis your chances of catching an STD would drop to 0, and it would cure any STD's you had prior, would this then make it morally legitimate to chop off males entire penises? After all, you can't get Genital Herpes without Genitals right?Are you also unable to see the difference between taking a vaccine and deliberetely trying to infect yourself with the Ebola virus? Or defending yourself from a mugger with your fists and defending yourself from a mugger with a nuke?Aside from the superficial similarity of "The penis is in some way cut" circumcision and completely chopping off the penis are completely different in how they effect the person. As shown with peer reviewed scientific studies and so far refuted by you with nothing, circumcision doesn't result in harm to the person receiving it aside from some short-term soreness while it heals. Chopping off an entire penis will disable someone for their entire life. Those are two very very VERY different things. Again, unable to actually come up with any reasons why circumcision is wrong based on its own merits Pro is forced to make these comparisons which are absurd to the most extreme degree.Religious freedom is necessarily limited to that which an individual decides to do with their own self- this in no way permits people to infringe others liberties in the practise of their religion. It was part of the Mayans religion to rip out their children's hearts, and yet this is banned, regardless of a persons religion. It is part of the Muslims religion to commit terrorist attacks, and yet this is illegal, without regard to the religion of the person committing them. The babies that this barbaric practise is being done to are not Jews or Muslims, they are Atheists- and so this practise is not permitted under the Freedom of Religion, but instead violates this right. This isn't banned because "Religious freedom is necessarily limited to that which an individual decides to do with their own self". It wouldn't be legal to rip someone's heart out even if they agreed.The reasons ALL freedoms are limited (not just religious freedom) is limited is because people's rights come into conflict. When this happens, a framework is needed to resolve how the conflict of these rights is settled and that framework is the lawIf your right to liberty come into conflict with other people's right to life because you're a serial killer and are murdering them, your right to liberty will be impinged upon by being imprisoned because the widespread consensus is that people' right to life is far more important.A less extreme example would be the Levenson enquiry in the UK where therer was a serious enquiry into the nature of the right to privacy versus the right to freedom of speech/thepress and whether the current laws were imbalanced too much and didn't offer a fair middle ground. [6]Now as far as I am aware, literally EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY ON EARTH considers parents to be able to give consent by proxy to their children on a wide range of issues and considers male circumcision to be firmly in the camp of a legal and permissable expression of Freedom of Religion because of the absence of adverse effects (unlike murdering people as per your examples). So literally every single national judiciary and legislative body on the planet disagrees with your interpretations of how human rights and religious freedom work. Milton Friedman states:"We do not believe in the right of the parents to do whatever they will with their children- to beat them, murder them, or sell them into slavery. Children are responsible individuals in embryo. They have ultimate rights of heir own and are not simply the play-things of their parents." {3}Firstly, why should we care what Milton Friedman states on this matter?Secondly, even if we do care you have again helped disprove your entire argument - although in this case it isn't quite obvious. I have to do a bit of work because you're cherrypicking the quote to misrepresent Friedman - an ethically poor tactic that shouldn't be used in an honest and open debate. Let me quote that full section;"A fourth duty of government that Adam Smith did not explicitly mention is the duty to protect members of the community who cannot be regarded as "responsible" individuals. Like Adam Smith's third duty, this one, too, is susceptible of great abuse. Yet it cannot be avoided. Freedom is a tenable objective only for responsible individuals. We do not believe in freedom for madmen or children. We must somehow draw a line between responsible individuals and others, yet doing so introduces a fundamental ambiguity into our ultimate objective of freedom. We cannot categorically reject paternalism for those whom we consider as not responsible. For children we assign responsibility in the first instance to parents. The family, rather than the individual, has always been and remains today the basic building block of our society, though its hold has clearly been weakening—one of the most unfortunate consequences of the growth of government paternalism. Yet the assignment of responsibility for children to their parents is largely a matter of expediency rather than principle. We believe, and with good reason, that parents have more interest in their children than anyone else and can be relied on to protect them and to assure their development into responsible adults. However, we do not believe in the right of the parents to do whatever they will with their children—to beat them, murder them, or sell them into slavery. Children are responsible individuals in embryo. They have ultimate rights of their own and are not simply the playthings of their parents."In fact what Friedman says is that parents are able to make choices on behalf of their children (a basic common sense idea almost everyone agrees with) but there are some extreme things disallowed like slavery and torture (again, common sense). At no point is it suggested that circumcision is in the camp of things like murder, therefore backing up my point of view.[1] https://goo.gl...[2] https://goo.gl...[3] https://goo.gl...[4] http://www.nhs.uk...[5] https://goo.gl...[6] https://goo.gl...