Female genital mutilation is …. think of it as cultural rape. England ain’t happy to be hosting so much of it, and its health secretary has just announced a bunch of new clinics across the country dedicated to dealing with this grotesque import.

Large numbers of students boycotted a lecturer at Trinity College who declared that mutilating the genitals of little girls can be, you know, more than fine under the right circumstances. He was denounced by every doctor in Ireland, and by the head of the Muslim community there. A professor of medicine at the school said he’d quit if Trinity didn’t infibulate Mr Calm Down Little Girl It Ain’t So Bad.

Well the dude was an adjunct and easily removed, but of course he’s suing now for back pay or whatever. Apparently he wants to be made intact again.

There is no room in this country, not one inch, for these gruesome practices. Nothing—not a witless respect for the cultural traditions of others, not a craven impulse to avoid looking intolerant—nothing should stop us from protecting every single American girl from being abused in this manner. Nothing should stop us from unequivocally prohibiting this kind of savagery, least of all the absurd insinuation that to do so would be somehow racist or ethnocentric. We do not reject FGM because it is practiced primarily by dark-skinned people, or because it is often erroneously presented as an Islamic commandment. We reject FGM because it is barbarism.

We have planted every flag we have in the name of civilization, and it is time to plant one now. America is the inheritor of that long tradition that slowly, over centuries, produced John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Abigail Adams, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. Want to fight the patriarchy? Look no further than Somalia, where women are disbarred from making every major decision, including that most delicate and tender decision of how to manage one’s own fledgling sexuality. The Somalis take that right from 98 percent of their girls when they cut them open and rip away parts of their vagina. But this is America. These are our girls. And we don’t do that here.

Ilhan Omar’s brushoff of Maryum Saifee’s urgent and pertinent question about female genital mutilation earned Saifee an NPR interview, during which she pointed out that since plenty of children in Omar’s own district suffer this abuse, it’s kind of rich of her to get all huffy and refuse to deal with the issue. Here’s more of what Saifee said:

[We need to be willing to talk about] misogyny within our own community… [N]obody talks about FGM. [It’s a ].. squeamish topic.

[Also problematically,] it is politicized as an anti-Muslim issue. [But this] doesn’t give the community a free pass not to talk about it. [In any case, FGM is not merely a local issue; it is an international] human rights issue. [It is] systematized child sexual abuse with a sharp object… 

[There’s] very low literacy on this issue, [and people need to be educated about it; silence of Omar’s sort is just the opposite of what’s needed].

Pennsylvania is about to become the 34th state to ban female genital mutilation; the law passed unanimously in the Senate and in the “House by a vote of 196-1, with only state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, D-Philadelphia voting against it.”

Yes, Kenyatta alone stood up against the crowd for the right of seven year olds to have their clitorises and vaginal lips chopped off and then to have what’s left bleeding between their legs sewn up by some random person. Every girl deserves the right to sexual numbness and a lifetime of pain and infections, and Representative Kenyatta is working hard every day to make sure that right is protected.

If you’re one of his constituents, be proud. You have voted into office the only politician in Pennsylvania with the guts to go to bat for the forced amputation of female genitals. UD thinks the guy should run for president:

America Needs an Infibulation

Leave No Clit Behind

Yes We Can Cut!

… Alan Dershowitz’s work is never done. Having finished advising for the defense team of a notorious alleged clit-slasher, he now moves on to his own defense in a defamation/sex trafficking case.

[W]hy are we so reticent about the clitoris? Why is … mention of it … deemed too sordid for BBC news?

The big difference here seems to be that while the vagina has an obvious functional utility, the clitoris exists entirely for female pleasure. It seems that the issue stems, not from the provocative nature of a word, but our continued societal taboo regarding women daring to enjoy sex. Sure, we can see depictions of women shrieking with pleasure plastered all over any porn site. But that is exactly the point. Female sexual enjoyment remains exclusively in the realm of the forbidden.

Lucy McCormick, The Guardian

Australia this time, with a mother feeling for some reason compelled to lie through her teeth about having arranged a procedure she thinks comes “from God.” The jury found her guilty in a matter of minutes. Send enough mutilators to jail and the baby-slashing rate will go down.

Yes. Britain finally sends a child-slasher – make that baby-slasher – to jail.

— because they’re never too young!

… Your divine appeal?

The feds will continue to go after America’s Super-Clit-Slasher herself, the pride of Johns Hopkins medical school, Jumana Nagarwala. Will she wield her well-trained knife once again, against the joy, integrity, and welfare of our nation’s children? Stay tuned.

The first American surgeon to open a reconstructive surgery clinic has called for Super Clit-Slasher Jumana Nagarwala to lose her medical license.  UD has called on Johns Hopkins University, which awarded her the MD degree, to make a public statement condemning her, and to revoke her degree.

My Country

We’re proud to acknowledge that it’s
A cultural mandate to blitz
The joy of our girls
By taking their pearls
And blasting their pleasure to bits

God sayeth Lo cut off their clits!
Uncastrated woman commits
A sin in my sight!
Under cover of night
Take babies and rip out their slits!

We’ll tell it to the UN, we’ll tell it to the world! We’re here, we’re clit-slashers, get used to it.

As UD anticipated, not a thing has been done by whatever they’re calling a government in Somalia these days about the deaths of little girls from mutilated genitals. And of course

It is clear to those of us who have worked on the issue for years that the recent deaths we have heard about in Somalia and elsewhere are not uncommon.