I received the following comment on my blog “Establishment of religion” via email:
If they succeed against us, I guarentee the next step will be to make circumcision illegal. It is something that is very hip in the liberal society. People who consider religion and God to be “mythological.” The “health concerns” with circumcision are being spread around. What isn’t being talked about is all of the health concerns that support circumcision. Like the lower risk of transmitting an STD or the fact that there is not a single case of penis cancer in a circumcised male.
My email reply got so long, I decided to blog it (lucky you! ::grin::) …
This is just another example of the apparent double standard of the Left that exposes their single hidden agenda. None of this stuff is about promoting the health and happiness of human beings.
It is all about Satan’s hatred for God and his war on God’s people.
I have long been intrigued by Paul’s First Letter to Timothy, Chapter 4, verses 1-3. In it, Paul says that in the End Times,
Some will be seduced by spirits and the doctrines of devils. They will speak lies in hypocrisy. Their consciences will be seared with a hot iron. They will forbid people to marry and command them to abstain from meats.
That last part has been used by some Protestants as evidence that the Catholic Church is supposedly the Great Satan that will bring on the End Times.
The argument goes that forbidding people to marry refers to priestly celibacy and that commanding people to abstain from meat refers to our Lenten fasts.
To his credit, the street evangelist who first challenged me on this actually listened politely to my brilliant exegesis. Either that or else seeing a Catholic pull a pocket New Testament out of her purse left him so gobsmacked, he couldn’t think straight. 😉
Anyway … I just read an on-line commentary on these two points and it turns out I correctly recall the arguments that guy made back on a street corner in the late 1970s. But, like my street evangelist, the on-line commentary gave no evidence (never mind, convincing evidence) to support the contention that Paul’s generalized statements should be interpreted in such a limited manner.
Nor does it acknowledge the absurdity of pointing to two of the most ancient traditions of the oldest church on the planet as meaningful signs of the impending End Time.
The first official church edict prohibiting deacons, priests and bishops to marry was made at the Council of Elvira in Spain in about 306.
Pope St. Gregory issued the rule to “abstain from flesh, meat, and from all things that come from flesh, as milk, cheese and eggs” during Lent in the sixth century.
I Tim 4:3 isn’t fulfilled in Catholic tradition; it’s inherent in the policies, preachings and teachings of the Left.
Among themselves, Leftists reject the very idea of marriage. In public, they assault our laws limiting it to one man and one woman. They claim this is about fairness, but it’s really just a step toward their End Game … which is to abolish marriage.
First they’ll get gay marriage legalized, then they’ll move on to legalizing polygamy, group marriage and inter-species marriage. Eventually, the definition of marriage will be so meaningless that they’ll just outlaw it altogether.
It’s all part and parcel of their glorification of sex anywhere, any time and in any form, without the “punishment” of a baby.
Years ago, tennis pro Billy Jean King bragged on how she’d aborted so she wouldn’t miss a tennis tournament.
Now we have a United States President mandating that religious organizations and private companies provide birth control, sterilization and abortifacients, free of charge and on demand.
And the same President has stated publicly that sex education should begin in kindergarten.”It’s the right thing to do.”
All of this … separating sex from marriage and procreation, destroying marriage … is about destroying the institution that is the first and foremost transmitter of FAITH and MORALS — the FAMILY.
The situation with eating meat is similar.
Among themselves, Leftists reject the very idea of eating meat. In public, they claim to be all multi-culti tolerant of others, but I’ve seen what they do when they have the power. And it’s not even remotely tolerant.
Years ago, I joined a health food co-op. Its organizers and original member base were nuts-and-berries Leftists. Some of us needed and/or wanted access to organic meats, which at the time were not available in regular grocery stores. Only after a big battle with the intolerant majority rulers were we permitted to have a small supply of organic meats added to the store’s product line.
But it wasn’t allowed out in plain sight of shoppers, lest some delicate hot-house flower of a vegetarian catch a glimpse of dead animals wrapped in plastic.
You know how video shops sequester the dirty movies in a back room behind a curtain or door? We icky meat eaters had to do the same Walk of Shame into this creepy, darkened area in the back of the store to get at the one isolated freezer where the dead animal products were segregated from all the food that good and decent people ate.
Now that I think about it … I’m kind of surprised they didn’t make us brown bag it back there so fellow shoppers wouldn’t have to accidentally see it as we traversed the aisles.
It’s almost funny how fragile these people seem to be. Never mind sticks, stone or mean words. Just a GLANCE at a dead chicken or a Nativity scene is enough to make them swoon! It’s no wonder there was so much fainting at those Obama rallies.
Is it absurd that they’d legislate dietary laws? Not at all. We’re heading there now.
The Socialist Sanctuary of San Francisco (where Presidential Candidate Obama felt comfortable sneering at “those” people who bitterly cling to their Bibles and their guns) banned toys in Happy Meals, because kids like toys and Happy Meals are Bad.
The President’s wife has been running around the country for three years, telling people what they should and should not eat.
And a Presidential adviser is out in the public schools as we speak, telling little kids that their mommies are too stupid to make good lunches, so they should eat what the government mandates.
That last one is particularly insidious, undermining the family unit AND indoctrinating little children with the idea that the government has the right to tell them how to eat.
In the bigger picture, I think the Left’s obsession with vegetarianism fits hand-in-glove with their war on our 2d Amendment rights. After all, their End Game is to subdue and enslave us under a dictatorial One World Government, something they cannot do so long as we are armed.
(Read the Book of Revelation, then listen to people like George Soros. It’s all happening.)
How long have they been chipping away at private gun ownership? I remember passing out pro-gun control pamphlets in the mid- to late-seventies, back when I was young, stupid and liberal. I wept over their trademark sob stories about gun accidents and really bought their mantra that gun control laws were For The Children!
(I wised up when I watched Larry Elder’s documentary “Michael and Me.” I’ve had a lot of my opinions changed and attitudes adjusted over the years, but that is the one time I can definitively point to when I did a total 180 on an issue in the space of 90 minutes. It’s a very compelling movie.)
As with destroying the family, the Left isn’t going after their big goal of disarming the American public all at once. For now, they say they aren’t after hunters who eat what they kill, but like the mouse and the cookie, every time they win a little ground, they begin demanding more.
When I was young, good liberals were vegetarians; now they’re vegans.
When I was young, PETA was about stopping horrors like puppy breeding mills; now they pursue lawsuits designed to get their extreme definition of animal rights legislated from Leftist court benches.
It will be a series of steps … they’ll go from “guns are okay for hunters” to “animals have the same rights as people” to “killing animals is murder” to “civilians can’t own guns.”
Will the Left ban meat (and guns) some day? You betcha!
I never thought about it before my e-bud wrote to me today, but I think she’s right. They’ll also go after male circumcision, the same as they’ve gone after birth control.
And they’ll do it for the same reason — because it’s important to a significant and easily identifiable group of God’s people.
They’ve started toward that goal by condemning and banning female circumcision where they can. Like kids who accidentally shoot themselves, female circumcision is great for sob story legislation. It has a very high ick factor and is not widely practiced. But the real point of getting it banned is that it moves the Left a step closer to their End Game, which is stomping their big old jackboot down on the necks of God’s faithful servants.
How should we deal with this? St. Peter laid it out here:
1 Peter 5: To the Elders and the Flock
1 To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ’s sufferings who also will share in the glory to be revealed: 2 Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; 3 not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. 4 And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.
5 In the same way, you who are younger, submit yourselves to your elders. All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because, “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.”
6 Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. 7 Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
8 Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. 9 Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.
10 And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. 11 To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen.
————–
SOURCES:
History of celibacy in the Catholic Church
http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/mland~celibacy.htm
History of Lent by Fr. William Saunders
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0527.html
polination.blog 
I have been a vegetarian since I was a fetus. I have never harassed any meat eater about what they had on their plate. I have, however, endured decades of caustic comments about MY food from people who eat meat. It is not simply a matter of poor carnivores being tormented by intolerant, left-wing vegans, I promise you.
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I never said it was. My favorite niece is a vegan and she’s a wonderful, tolerant person. My article was about the bigger picture and how it ties into the spiritual war and scripture.
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Over the years, I honed a needle-pointed response to people who made fun of my food, but I am not a Vegetable Missionary. The only time I was ever really disturbed by someone’s meat was when one of the doctors ordered tongue from the Mexican restaurant one night when someone went for takeout. She opened it at the front nurses’ station, and it smelled so awful I, quietly and without comment (she was one of my favorite MDs) took my food to the back desk and ate there. Meat and I coexist peacefully, in our separate spheres. 😎
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“Like the lower risk of transmitting an STD or the fact that there is not a single case of penis cancer in a circumcised male.”
Neither claim is true. There are as many studies showing no protection against STDs as showing any. Penile cancer is vanishingly rare in any case, and when circumcised men get it, it is on the scar, which ought to tell you something.
The reason for wanting to restrict circumcision to consenting adults is as American as apple-pie: indvidual freedom. Cutting a baby boy’s genials violates HIS freedom of religion, the security of HIS person from unreasonable seizures and HIS equality with females.
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You are right about the studies. There are a lot of very mixed results, but most recently, they support what you are saying. There’s a very good book, written as a response to The Vagina Monologues, which covers a lot of data and statistics from around the world about the practice of circumcision.
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Outside of the discussion to circumcise or not to circumcise, I find your second paragraph a bit of a preponderance but with time constraints choose not to go into.
Referring to female mutilation as “circumcision” was originally used as a way to frame male circumcision as mutilation, which it is not. They are not even on the same plane. It also is one thing to mandate all boys be circumcised and without parent consent (which one of mine was) in the hospital and another thing to mandate it cannot be done. It is not surgery. It is not mutilation. In fact, when done as prescribed thousands of years ago, it does not even come close to either. Modern medicine’s procedure is a different story. A ritual-circumcised penis actually looks uncircumcised when compared to a medical-circumcised penis. In any event, tax dollars should not be paying for it.
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I am all in favor of banning female “circumcision,” more accurately known as female genital mutilation. It is widely practiced in Muslim countries (it’s nearly universal in some of them), and it’s also practiced in Muslim immigrant communities in the U.S. and western Europe. It is a hideous, brutal, barbaric practice with no purpose whatsoever except to keep women under male control. It has no place in any civilized society.
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Would they ban the Jewish from their eighth day ritual (Bris) circumcision?
We had two of our sons circumcised by a Jewish moyl (spelling??) because no doctor would do it as they babies were born at home. It was really cool and so humane compared to the way the doctor/hospital did it. We had the whole ceremony (minus the party and spectators) and was very special with the prayers and the singing (he was a cantor, as well) Since the boys did not have the vitamin K shot it was important to waIt until the eight day for blood-clotting abilities that happen about then. The cantor explained that we were first Jews, then Christians and had every right to claim the command as our own. It was the farthest thing from a medical procedure and all a religious ceremony at that point. Also, things healed so fast compared to having it done withing first day or two.
Female mutilation is practiced in this country in Dearborn. The woman would come to the hospital and deliver babies and the person delivering were not allowed to see anything and were expected to deliver the babies blindly. Everyone thinks this is because of modesty; it is because the dirty little secret would be seen. The hospital went along with the special demands because if they did not, the men would never bring the woman in and many would bleed to death because you simply cannot deliver a baby without massive tearing when you are sewn up, which is what is done along with the mutilation. Ann Barnhart has a graphic video and explains why the sewing up is done. I don’t know if things have changed in Dearborn but it was this way fifteen years.
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Female genital mutilation would be an atrocity even if it were done in sterile conditions, by a licensed physician, with anesthesia. In reality, it is usually committed by someone who is not a doctor, in a non-sterile environment, and without any anesthesia or pain relief to the victims. The little girls are sometimes lured to the place where the mutilation will take place by being told there’s going to be party for them there, and they go willingly, expecting something exciting and fun, and when they arrive they are held down and mutilated. Their screams of pain and terror are ignored. It’s a practice that goes beyond barbaric.
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