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Senate Bill 1777, the Massachusetts State Prohibition of Genital

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Van Lewis

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Feb 20, 2010, 7:16:05 PM2/20/10

Senator Cynthia Creem, Senate Judiciary Chair
Senator Steven Baddour, Senate Judiciary Vice-Chair
Senator Gale Candara, Judiciary Committee member
Senator Jack Hart, Judiciary Committee member
Senator Thomas McGee, Judiciary Committee member
Senator Bruce Tarr, Judiciary Committee member

Rep. Eugene O9 Flaherty, House Judiciary Chair
Rep. Christopher Speranzo, House Judiciary Vice-Chair
Rep. James Fagan, Judiciary Committee member
Rep. Colleen Garry, Judiciary Committee member
Rep. Marie St. Fleur, Judiciary Committee member
Rep. John Fernandes, Judiciary Committee member
Rep. Katherine Clark, Judiciary Committee member
Rep. James Dwyer, Judiciary Committee member
Rep. Danielle Gregoire, Judiciary Committee member
Rep. Lewis Evangelidis, Judiciary Committee member
Rep. Daniel Webster, Judiciary Committee member

Michael Avitzur, Legislative Counsel

Dear Senators and Representatives of the Massachusetts Judiciary Committees,
and Legislative Counsel:

Boys and intersex children not only deserve but have an absolute
constitutional and human right to fully equal genital protection with girls.
Period. Everything else you hear on this subject is irrelevant to your
correct decision on the vitally important, history-making Senate Bill 1777,
the Massachusetts State Prohibition of Genital Mutilation Act

"Equal Justice Under Law" is written in stone above the entrance to the U.S.
Supreme Court for a reason. We just can't remember what it was, one of the
unfortunate side-effects of male genital mutilation.

Please let me point out the obvious and crucial fact that each and every one
of you took a sacred oath upon entering office that you would protect and
defend the constitutions of the the USA and of the state of Massachusetts
against all enemies, domestic and foreign. One of the most essential
components of Equal Justice Under Law is equal protection of the law for all
people. Non-discrimination in the application and enforcement of law is not
optional in Massachusetts or the rest of the USA. It is mandatory. We are
all equal before the law.

In the USA, including Massachusetts, the most blatantly sexually
discriminatory law on the books is the law giving strong protection to girls
and their sex organs but none at all to boys and intersex children and their
equally important sex organs. This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is
sexist. It is intolerable. And it is sometimes lethal. Boys die from
medically unnecessary circumcising, too, not just girls. For a woefully
incomplete list of known deaths from circumcising - boys, girls and adults -
see http://intact.wikia.com/wiki/Death_By_Circumcision.

Circumcising harms and diminishes EVERY child against whom this heinous,
disgusting, hideous sex crime is committed. Rendering only non-female
children unnecessarily and permanently partial violates their most sacred
human rights to bodily integrity, security of person, equal protection of
the law, etc.

Any legislator who fails to grant equal protection to all children and their
sex organs is guilty of violating his or her sacred oath of office to
protect and defend our constitutions, and has become an enabler and
accomplice of and a co-conspirator with those committing the undeniably
medically unnecessary genital torture, wounding and mutilation and the
violent sexual abuse, crippling and further reckless endangerment of
children. In the absence of vanishingly rare dire medical necessity, these
are blatantly obvious criminal acts.

I know it is very hard to impossible for some to see obvious reality as it
relates to human sex organs. We've been carefully taught to see only what we
were taught to see, and to NOT see what we are "not supposed to see". Our
pasts often blind us to present reality. We "see" only what we think we
already "know" - what is already in our own minds on any particular subject
- instead of what is in front of our eyes:

"The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes longer."
-Edward R. Murrow

Most of us were brought up in a genitally mutilating culture of origin - a
minority custom worldwide - which practices and regards genital mutilation
(of males ONLY) as normal and beneficial (and of females as abnormal and
disgusting). Medically unnecessary, elective genital mutilation is anything
but normal and beneficial. The sex of the child harmed is totally
irrelevant. Do we really have to know the sex of a child in his or her
circumcision grave before we can know whether the dead child's right to life
was grossly and unnecessarily violated by genital mutilation?

Please educate yourselves competently on this sometimes very difficult but
nevertheless very simple subject. I commend to you an essay about it,
"Circumcision", by Jewish Harvard Nobel Laureate biologist, George Wald. It
is located in his box 103 in the Harvard Archives. They will provide you a
copy upon your request. Please ask for one. A summary of Dr. Wald's
important essay, with quotes from it, can be found at
http://sicsociety.org/crick-wald.htm

Above all, fulfill your sacred obligation and oath to provide all with equal
protection of the law. Anything else is un-American - treasonous to the
sacred obligation which you voluntarily assumed to protect our
constitutions, to protect all of us equally. That is what history requires
of you in your upcoming hearing on March 2, 2010. I hope you are up to the
vitally important task before you. Children's lives depend on you, on what
you decide. Will it be constitutionally mandated equal protection of the
law? Or more unconstitutional, always injurious and sometimes lethal sex
discrimination? The choice, now, is yours.

In a very few years, mutilated boys and men will be asking you, "What did
you know, and when did you know it?"

This document and many others will be available online to answer their
question. You cannot hide from them. They will hold you, too, fully
accountable before the law.

Van Lewis, Administrator
Ashley Montagu Campaign Against the Torture and Mutilation of Children
Ashley Montagu Resolution to End the Genital Mutilation of Children
Worldwide: A Petition to the World Court, the Hague
http://MontaguNoCircPetition.org
P. O. Box 323
Panacea, Florida 32346
vanl...@post.harvard.edu
850-697-3857

Van Lewis

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Feb 20, 2010, 7:20:45 PM2/20/10

Here are the email addresses for all of the Massachusetts judiciary
committee members. Please take this opportunity to write to them:

...

Subject: S 1777 - Massachusetts State Prohibition of Genital Mutilation Act

Michael Avitzur, Legislative Counsel

Dear Senators and Representatives of the Massachusetts Judiciary Committees,
and Legislative Counsel:

...

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