Florida’s capital might be technically set among the foul-smelling hills and dales of Tallahassee, but Miami is the real epicenter for the patented brand of flagrant weirdness that marks our state as a global destination for charlatans and miscreants of every stripe.
Hammering home that point, just last month Miami also became the worldwide focal point of the intactivist movement.
Intactivists believe, quite deeply, that cutting off the foreskin of newborn male babies is barbaric and unnecessary, and their movement thrives in the prickly wilderness that is the World Wide Web.
Gathering strength from their existence at the vital crossroads of the Internet, where conspiracy theories and the discussion and display of genitalia fortuitously meet, intactivists were outraged by the news in mid-September that a baby born at the Baptist Hospital of Miami had his little soldier snipped against the wishes of his parents.
Naturally, the mom hired a Jewish lawyer and is suing the hospital for $1 million.
A protest in Miami only managed to draw a handful of intactivists away from the comfort of their computer chairs, but a second planned protest hopes to have far more success as the case works its way through the legal system.
It’s my hope this next protest is a rousing success and the vocal leaders of the intactivist movement are all drawn to Miami, where a large net can be thrown on top of them and they can all be safely transported to Europe or New Zealand.
You see, getting rid of the foreskin is what propelled America to greatness in the 20th century. The greatest generation defeated the Nazis in north Africa while simultaneously fighting the krauts and their own oily, stinky foreskins. Most estimates put the number of American GIs undermined by an inability to properly clean their wrinkly members at about 145,000.
After the war, American doctors universally recommended the circumcision of male babies. Decades of success followed, resulting in things like cable television, boy bands and flash-frozen vegetables.
Unburdened by foreskins, America vaulted to the top of the world economic structure.
As foreskins have proliferated in recent decades, America has fallen from greatness.
Battered by intactivists and economic woes, many states have decided it best to stop paying for babies to have their foreskins removed. Sixteen states do not cover neonatal circumcision under Medicaid, Florida being among the uncovered minority.
Here in Florida, we ask parents to pay between $250 and $500 out of pocket to have their sons snipped right after birth. Many refuse, knowing Medicaid will pick up the tab after three months when the child must be put under anesthesia and taxpayers end up paying more than $5,000 to cover what is now a serious surgical procedure.
At hospitals that still accept Medicaid, there is a yearlong waiting list for taxpayer-sponsored circumcisions.
Floridians are used to putting up with a certain level of craziness, but we cannot accommodate the intactivist wackos with their posters of crying babies and general acceptance of mediocrity.
By succumbing to interest groups and waffling as we are trained to do, America has created a much more expensive way to skin a cat.
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His column appears every Tuesday.
