Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Splinter Fraction: Male Circumcision Should Be Outlawed — 1 Million Percent

Note: This piece argues that male circumcision should be strictly outlawed for non-consenting minors. It approaches the topic from a strict bodily autonomy framework regarding non-consensual, non-therapeutic interventions on minors, and treats irreversible bodily alteration without consent as the central ethical issue. It is not addressing medically necessary or emergency procedures, nor situations where an intervention is required to prevent serious immediate harm, which are outside its scope. The argument also focuses on principle rather than comparative cultural practice, and is intended as a normative claim about legal consistency in liberal systems rather than a commentary on individual intent, belief, or identity.

Epigraph:

Jesus don’t touch my baby.

Ryan Adams

Male Circumcision Should Be Outlawed — 1 Million Percent

Male circumcision of non-consenting minors should be outlawed globally, with legal penalties applied to those who perform or facilitate it, and civil penalties imposed on parents who authorise it. I was circumcised in infancy in a Catholic family in 1974. The issue is not medical ambiguity or cultural discomfort but a basic question of bodily autonomy: whether irreversible, non-therapeutic alteration of a child’s body can ever be justified without consent. In a liberal legal system that claims to prioritise individual rights, the answer should be consistent and categorical. Anything less relies on inherited exemptions—religious, medical, or cultural—that do not withstand ethical scrutiny once the principle is stated plainly.

The core objection is simple: irreversible bodily modification without consent is impermissible when it is not medically necessary. A child cannot consent, and parental authority is not unlimited; it is a delegated responsibility bounded by the child’s future autonomy. Circumcision is not an emergency intervention. It is not a life-saving procedure in the vast majority of cases. It is the removal of healthy tissue from an individual who will live the entirety of their life with that alteration imposed before they had any capacity to participate in the decision.

This is where liberal societies already reveal a partial but incomplete consistency. We accept that consent is not static across childhood. We do not allow children to make binding decisions about sexual activity, because we recognise developmental thresholds of agency and understanding. That is why age of consent laws exist at all, and why they sit at or near adulthood in most jurisdictions. But the same logic applies more fundamentally to irreversible bodily alteration. If we accept that certain domains require maturity before consent is meaningful, then permanent physical modification must fall under the same principle. The difference is not moral category; it is legal lag.

The counter-case is not weak in structure, even if it fails ethically. It rests on four main claims: parental rights, medical justification, religious freedom, and social normalisation. Parents are routinely empowered to make medical decisions on behalf of children under a “best interests” standard. Circumcision is often placed within this framework as a preventive health measure. Some studies are cited to suggest reduced risks of urinary tract infections or sexually transmitted infections later in life, and complication rates in clinical settings are presented as low. On this basis, it is framed not as cosmetic alteration but as permissible preventive medicine.

Religion provides a second pillar. In Judaism, circumcision is a covenantal rite central to religious identity. In Islam, it is widely practiced as a tradition of purification and belonging. Liberal states are deeply reluctant to interfere with such practices, treating them as protected expressions of religious freedom. On this view, banning circumcision would represent not neutrality but intrusion into foundational religious life.

The third pillar is cultural and social integration. In societies where circumcision is widespread, particularly where it is near-universal within certain populations, deviation can create stigma or perceived abnormality. The argument follows that enforcing prohibition could impose social harm on children by marking them as different within their communities. Finally, legal systems distinguish male circumcision from female genital cutting on the basis of severity, medical context, and institutionalisation within healthcare systems, arguing that harm is not equivalent and therefore regulation need not be symmetrical.

Taken together, these arguments form a sort of a defense of permissibility under existing liberal frameworks: parental discretion within medical norms, protected religious practice, and harm-based legal classification.

But each of these pillars collapses under a stricter application of bodily autonomy.

Parental authority is real, but it is not sovereign. It exists only insofar as it serves the future autonomy and welfare of the child. It does not extend to irreversible, non-therapeutic bodily alteration where no immediate necessity exists. The “best interests of the child” standard is not a blank cheque; it is a constraint. We already recognise this in other domains where the state intervenes against parental choice when irreversible harm or violation of fundamental rights is at stake. The question is whether we apply that constraint consistently.

Medical justification also fails the threshold test when examined carefully. Even if certain population-level benefits exist, they are statistical, not essential. They can be achieved through far less invasive means—hygiene, education, barrier protection—without permanently altering the body of an individual who has not consented. Preventive possibility is not sufficient justification for irreversible intervention. Medicine does not normally operate on the principle that minor statistical risk reduction permits non-consensual surgery on healthy individuals.

Religious justification is where liberal systems most visibly reveal their tension. Freedom of religion is a foundational principle, but it is not absolute. It has never been interpreted as permitting unlimited parental action upon a child’s body. The critical distinction is between belief and irreversible physical imposition. Religious freedom protects the right to believe, to practice, and to transmit culture—but it cannot logically extend to authorising permanent bodily modification of an individual who has not consented to participate in that covenant. A child is born into a tradition, not owned by it.

The social integration argument similarly confuses descriptive normativity with ethical justification. That a practice is common within a group does not mean deviation is harmful in a way that justifies irreversible intervention. Social discomfort is not equivalent to bodily violation. Otherwise, any culturally dominant practice could immunise itself from ethical scrutiny simply by achieving prevalence.

The legal distinction between male circumcision and female genital cutting is often defended on the basis of harm severity and medical framing. But this distinction, while operationally convenient, becomes unstable when the underlying principle is examined. If the governing value is bodily integrity and consent, then sex-based differences do not determine permissibility. The relevant question is not comparative severity alone, but whether irreversible non-consensual alteration is being authorised at all. Harm thresholds may differ in degree, but the structural violation—altering a child’s body without consent—remains.

Once these counter-arguments are reduced to their core, what remains is not a justification but a set of accommodations: to tradition, to institutional history, to religious continuity, and to cultural inertia. None of these constitute a moral defence of the act itself; they constitute reasons why it persists.

This is why enforcement matters. A principle without enforcement is not a principle in practice. If bodily autonomy is to mean anything in a liberal legal system, it must be protected even when the practice is culturally embedded or religiously significant. That requires prohibition of the act itself, accountability for those who perform it in violation of the rule, and civil liability for those who authorise it on behalf of non-consenting minors. The aim is not punishment for its own sake, but alignment of law with the ethical principle it already claims to uphold in other domains of bodily autonomy.

What makes this issue more than historical critique is that it persists into the present as a live inconsistency. It is 2026. Liberal legal systems already recognise that bodily autonomy is foundational in adulthood. They already recognise that consent has developmental thresholds. They already prohibit non-consensual genital alteration in other contexts. The remaining question is whether they are prepared to apply the same principle consistently when tradition, religion, and medical normalisation converge.

A system that protects bodily autonomy only after adulthood has not resolved the ethical question; it has merely deferred it. The principle either applies universally to the body of the individual, or it does not. If it does, then non-therapeutic circumcision of minors cannot stand as an exception. 1 million percent.

Note: This piece is part of the Splinter Fraction series of political positions that the two-person Trans-Pacific political party has taken. You can find some of the others below.

On the Federal Age of Consent: A Reply to Alan Dershowitz
The Splinter Fraction: On Trans Issues, A Working Position
The Splinter Fraction: On Protected Medical Access for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Larry King, the Radio GOAT

Epigraph:

“I listened to the radio / I waited all night long…”
— Radio Radio, Elvis Costello

Note: This piece reflects my personal memories of listening to Larry King’s overnight radio show in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with later impressions from television appearances, interviews, and conversations with people who knew him. It is written in the spirit of appreciation and nostalgia rather than media criticism, and emphasizes the uniquely loose, humane, and unpredictable quality of King’s radio work, which for me remains the defining core of his legacy.

I grew up listening to Larry King’s overnight radio show between roughly 1988 and 1992, and in my opinion — which happens to be correct — the radio show was much better than the television version that later made him famous. The TV show was good, even great at times, but radio was longer, looser, freer, and far more unpredictable. It had weird guests, weirder callers, and the feeling that anything might happen at two in the morning. That’s where Larry really lived.

I would listen in my bedroom at my parents’ house in Spokane, Washington, the volume turned low, the house quiet, insomnia hovering. The Spokane AM station — KGA 1510 — carried the show from around 9 PM Pacific time, and then, wonderfully, they would run it again. So I’d listen from nine to midnight, fade, wake at two or three, and hear the same segment again in a half-dream. The effect was surreal. Didn’t I just hear that caller? Didn’t Larry just say that? It created a strange loop of late-night déjà vu that only made the whole thing more atmospheric. The show felt less like programming and more like a continuous nocturnal conversation.

My friend Kelly Rudd loved Larry too. When we were in high school we were both big fans of the radio show, and we talked about it constantly. There were a couple of things that we especially liked. The first was that Larry famously did no preparation. He knew a huge amount about the world, of course, but he didn’t read guests’ books ahead of time. He wanted to come in cold. If his guest was a firefighter, he’d ask, “So what’s it like to be a firefighter?” It sounds lazy, but it was brilliant. By staying open and getting out of the way, he let the conversation go anywhere. This way the show became eventful.

Another thing we loved was what happened after the guest left. Larry would open the lines and take questions about absolutely anything. Most of the time he was generous and patient, but when callers went off the rails he had a signature phrase. He’d cut them off gently: “Cold compress, ma’am,” or “Cold compress, sir.” Basically: lie down, ice your head, regroup. It was hysterical, especially because he used it sparingly. When “cold compress” dropped, you knew things had gotten weird.

Anyway, Kelly and I loved Larry so much that when the station suddenly dropped the show, Kelly proposed we drive to the radio station and protest. So we skipped school, drove across town, and rang the intercom demanding to speak to someone about the cancellation. The station manager eventually came down and heard us out. We knew we weren’t changing anything, but it felt right to try. Larry never came back to Spokane radio, and the show faded not long after, but the whole episode captured what the show meant to us. It wasn’t just background noise. It felt alive.

Larry’s on-air style was the key. He was unbelievably relaxed. By the late ’80s you could tell he had done thousands of hours. Nothing fazed him. Weird guests, drunk callers, eccentrics — all the same to Larry. He absorbed everything. He had pet phrases — “cold compress” chief among them — and he deployed them like a veteran reliever, only when needed. He famously did no prep, and he leaned into naïve questions. He’d ask something simple and let the guest do the work. The effect was disarming. People opened up. He also had real humanity. He listened. He didn’t mock callers. He didn’t rush them. There was compassion there, and I think that’s what I loved most.

And the show could get wonderfully out of control. In one story Larry told from his old Miami days, an adult actress he was interviewing suggested they just have sex during the commercial break. Larry, amused, asked the producers to clear out — but there wasn’t enough time. That kind of anecdote captures the looseness of late-night radio. It wasn’t polished. It was alive.

Larry left the overnight Mutual Radio show in 1994 to focus on television. By then I had already drifted away, but I still caught Larry King Live on CNN over the years. I remember watching during the O. J. Simpson trial while at Otago University in New Zealand, when the show became part of the nightly noise. Later there were the Vladimir Putin interviews — classic Larry, conversational and oddly disarming. And of course there were the great comic moments, like the interview with Jerry Seinfeld where Larry suggested the show had been canceled and Seinfeld snapped back in disbelief, and the Norm Macdonald appearance where Norm kept repeating, “I’m a deeply closeted homosexual,” and Larry tried earnestly to parse it. “So that means you’re gay?” “No, Larry,” Norm replied, “it means I’m deeply closeted.” Pure Larry: sincere confusion meeting absurdist comedy.

Larry’s personal life was famously complicated. He married eight times, had several children — including sons Chance and Cannon later in life — and lived in a kind of perpetual romantic improvisation. The marriages came and went. The last ended painfully and publicly. He once joked he’d never leave his wife unless Angie Dickinson came along — and when she did, he married her. That was Larry: impulsive, affectionate, slightly chaotic. Despite decades of success, he didn’t leave the kind of massive fortune people assumed. The money came and went, as did the marriages. It was a life lived in motion.

My friend Sergio Mandiola actually knew Larry in his later years in Los Angeles. Sergio was running an independent studies program at Beverly Hills High School, and Larry’s sons Cannon and Chance, and he taught his sons for three years. Larry would come by for open nights or just to chat.

Sergio Mandiola: “Larry would come in from time to time and we would talk. He was lovely and open. He talked about his family and his career. One time he told me, ‘Sergio, you should totally have a radio show!’ I was flattered. One thing about Larry is his politics were more to the left than he let on on air. He had strong views and wasn’t afraid to share them in person. Larry was a true mensch and I’m glad I got to spend time with him. I miss him.”

In the end, I’ll say it plainly: for me, Larry King is the radio GOAT. There was no one like him, and there probably never will be. It wasn’t just longevity. It was the curiosity, the looseness, the humanity, the love of people, politics, baseball, and life. He trusted the conversation. He let the night unfold.

And then there was that absurd, wonderful USA Today column, which read like a diary gone completely outta control. Mets lose 6–4…Rain in Baltimore…Clinton flies to Ireland…You’d read it and think, Larry, baby, WTF is this? And also, Mr. USA Today, WTAF are you doing paying for this? But somehow it worked. It was pure Larry — fragmentary, observational, intimate.

And that’s how I remember him most clearly: late nights in high school, the radio turned low, insomnia hanging in the room, Spokane quiet outside.. Sometimes I’d listen from nine to midnight, fade, then wake again to the rerun, half-dreaming, half-aware, caught in that strange déjà vu — didn’t I just hear this? — while Larry kept talking, calm as ever, taking calls from truckers and insomniacs and eccentrics. My listening years were brief, but they stuck. And when I think of Larry now, that’s where I go back to: the low hum of AM radio, the half-fade, and the sweet sounds of his voice in my ear.

Dedication:

For the one and only GOAT, Larry Motherfucking King. RIP baby.