When Bush 43 was still — eww — in office, news broke that cir­cum­cised men had a lower chance of con­tract­ing HIV infec­tion than their uncut coun­ter­parts when hav­ing unpro­tected sex. The “news” was treated as a major break­through and, as I recall, a lot of coun­sel­ing was done of uncir­cum­cised men, sug­gest­ing they have their fore­skins removed instead of using con­doms.

That’s right, folks. It was deemed more wor­thy to advise men to per­ma­nently sur­gi­cally alter them­selves than roll on a bit of nitrile. And not just men, either. Peep it, homeys:

Writing in the Lancet, the team led by Dr Maria Wawer said … “Circumcising infants and young boys before their sex­ual debut would mit­i­gate the chal­lenge of male cir­cum­ci­sion in HIV-​​infected men.

“However, this strat­egy would require care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of issues relat­ing to parental con­sent and the minor’s consent.”

This leads one imme­di­ately to the ques­tion, what the hell is wrong with peo­ple? Just because some reli­gious nutjobs began rit­ual gen­i­tal muti­la­tion mil­len­nia ago, we are still try­ing to jus­tify it to our­selves today — and the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions, as it turns out, are (sur­prise!) non­sense.

Circumcising men who already have HIV does not pro­tect their female part­ners from the virus, a study in Uganda has found.

Gee, that’s just com­pletely shock­ing. One would almost assume that penis man­gling was some­how totally inef­fec­tive as a mag­i­cal shield.

The fact is, and has always been so, that the most effec­tive way of halt­ing HIV infec­tion — bar­ring the unrea­son­able “option” of absti­nence — is with a phys­i­cally imper­me­able bar­rier. Specifically, a con­dom. What kind of obtuse soci­ety lets it be more sen­si­ble to cut than wrap?

But hey, if that’s how you’re going to roll, why stop with the fore­skin? If a man is known to be HIV pos­i­tive, why not just lop his entire penis off? That would damn sure slow down his abil­ity to infect oth­ers. It’s only a mat­ter of degrees, folks.

Experts say HIV-​​positive men should still be offered cir­cum­ci­sion, but also warned to use condoms.

Some experts are not wor­thy of the term. “Hey, man, let me at you with these here snip­pers…” is absolutely not an alter­na­tive to prac­tic­ing safe sex. Advising men to lac­er­ate them­selves rather than, oh I don’t know, being intel­li­gent and respon­si­ble for their own actions, was a stu­pid tac­tic doomed to fail at the out­set. I can’t believe the amount of pro­fes­sional irre­spon­si­bil­ity that went into the deci­sion to sug­gest surgery before safety.

[T]he research, from the Lancet, showed no ben­e­fit in those who already had the virus and was stopped early because of the con­tin­ued risk to women.

Well. At least the rectal-​​cranial inver­sion wasn’t total, but it’s a near thing.