NYC Mayoral Hopefuls Totally Cool With You Sucking On Your Baby's Freshly Snipped Peen

New York Mag has a nice little roundup today of mayoral hopefuls' reactions to the greatest question facing New York City today: before a mohel completes the "beautiful ancient ritual" of sucking the blood off your baby's weiner, should you have to sign a consent form acknowledging that this practice has led to babies getting herpes, brain damage, and death? Or is a consent form the greatest type of Tyranny our Great Nation has ever known? Let us put on our Talmudic Scholar cap, and suck on this question for a while.

First, what did the mayoral hopefuls say to the question "would you continue to require that parents sign a consent form acknowledging the health risks attached to this religious ritual"?

Mostly, they were like "FUCK BLOOMBERG THAT FUCKING TYRANT FUCK. BIG GULP!!1!" You know, as you would expect.

Sal Albanese: Has concerns about metzitzah b'peh but promised to "bring everyone together" as mayor to figure out a consensus solution.

Bill de Blasio: Mayor Bloomberg "impose[d] his will" when he mandated the consent forms. Vowed to "start over" as mayor.

John Liu: Metzitzah b'peh had been going on "for thousands of years" until a "billionaire mayor" decided that he knew "better than everyone else." He would scrap it.

Christine Quinn: Doesn't approve of how the consent form was implemented, but would keep it in place.

Erick Salgado: Government has no place intruding on religious practices. He'd scrap it.

Anthony Weiner: Pretty much dodged the question entirely.

And how would we answer this question, were we running for mayor of New York City instead of President of the Internet?

How about: STOP GIVING YOUR BABIES HERPES, AND STOP CUTTING OFF GIRLS' CLITS WHILE WE WE ARE AT IT. There are valid (and neutral!) reasons to legislate bans on both those things.

Whut? But what about RELIGIOUS FREEDOM SHALL NOT ARGLE BARGLE?

Yeah, did you know that like the Second Amendment and the other parts of the First Amendment, it is not actually unkosher to "abridge" them sometimes? Like, there are limits on speech, and you have to get a permit to assemble EVEN THOUGH IT SAYS RIGHT THERE YOU CAN ASSEMBLE?

Here, let's ask Antonin Scalia to explain it for us:

We have never held that an individual's religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition.

But that was about dirty Indian hippies doing peyote, so fuck it.

[ NYMag ]