LA Couple Indicted for Seeking to Circumcise Girls

Every day in every way things are getting better and better.

Good grief! I don't even want to go shopping anymore! It seems we have an abundance of child molesters, rapists, murderers etc. I wonder how many times I have stood right next to one of these deeply disturbed people in line.

>>> a right of passage to womanhood that limits promiscuity <<<<

And the problem is.....? It’s a ethnic thing...But it’s OK with boys. Take a look at the welfare rolls. may need more of this.

Ol' Todd is way, waaaaaay into body modification.

You don't want to see his other work.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAaggghhhhhh.... I don't even understand half of the few pictures I looked at. Ok, confirming, ignorance is bliss....aaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggggggghhhh....

" I wonder how many times I have stood right next to one of these deeply disturbed people in line."

It's not so bad if you've got a 9mm stuck down the back of your pants.

When boys get the same protection against sexual mutilation (which we oh so politely call circumcision) I will be very happy.

Multiculturalism is such a civilizational booster, ain't it?

How did we ever get by before we imported the black holes that comprise the content of the collective character of so many of our different-but-equal turd wurld savage immigrants?

God save our beloved FRaternal republic.

...were acting out of religious or cultural belief.

I wonder what religion it is...

Take a look at the welfare rolls. may need more of this.

I think contrary to your name, you haven't been quiet long enough. So you're a supporter of female genital mutilation? This goes far beyond male circumcision.

No more than Male genital mutilation. And It does not go that far beyond male circumcision.
This is a old African tribal custom. Still practiced there.
We keep hearing All this Multi-culture, Ebonies, Evil-White males taking us from our heritage, how bad the USA is........ Well if they want to run around dressed up in there costumes. Spouting all this BS... They want there Culture. Let them have it. All of it.
Who are we to keep them from it.
Let’s see with jokes like “ What’s the definition of Father’s day in the NBA...... Mass confusion” And all these woman not marred but with eight kids. all to different fathers.
( Oh silly me. That’s right we only blame men for that) Maybe those tribes are smarter than everybody gives them credit for.

It's always interesting to watch feminism and multiculturalism collide. FGM is definitely a problem for the ROP's reputation.

http://www.ptreyeslight.com/columns/sparsely/sparsely0115_04.html

"Multiculturalism is such a civilizational booster, ain't it?"

What does this case have to do with multiculturalism? The accused just illustrate the current degeneracy of Western civilization.

And It does not go that far beyond male circumcision.

From cynwoody's link in #13:

Infibulation or Pharaonic circumcision is the most extreme operation, Sarkis notes. It "consists of the removal of the clitoris, the adjacent labia (majora and minora), and the joining of he scraped sides of the vulva across the vagina, where they are secured with thorns or sewn with catgut or thread. A small opening is kept to allow passage of urine and menstrual blood. An infibulated woman must be cut open to allow intercourse on the wedding night."

Yeah, that's almost the same as cutting the foreskin from a male-if the tip of the penis was cut off too. And it was sewn to the thigh to keep prevent an erection before the wedding day.

Ol' Todd is way, waaaaaay into body modification.

Man, those are two sick puppies!

The web site his hosted in Cananda, by the way:

Whois info for, toddbertrang.com:


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    Larratt, Shannon  shannon@bmezine.com
    247 Bathurst St.
    Toronto, ON M5T 2S4
    CA
    +1 416 203-3399
 Technical Contact:
    it.canada, hosting  support@it.ca
    http://www.it.ca/
    Box 867 Station F
    Toronto, ON M4Y 2N7
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    +1 416 598-0000    Fax: +1 416 598-3377



 Registration Service Provider:
    it.canada, hosting and development, domains@it.ca
    For technical support regarding your domain,
    please refer to the technical contact above.
    
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    regarding registration and renewals.
    
    it.canada can be found on the web at http://www.it.ca/


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Sparsely, Sage and Timely

By David V. Mitchell

Valley activist’s reaction to female-genital-mutilation arrests

In a series of grim conversations, during which the only humor was black, Marilyn Milos, RN, of Forest Knolls and I have been discussing the FBI’s arrests Friday of a Southern California man and woman who allegedly cut off underage-girls clitorises.

The man, Todd Cameron Bertrang, 41, boasted to an undercover agent that he had performed more such operations than "probably anyone in the Western World," according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court. Bertrang and his companion Robyn Faulkinbury, 24, are both from Canyon Country north of Los Angeles.

Bertrang operated a website on which he said he performed body modifications on men and women. The undercover agent, who contacted Bertrang by email, pretended to be the father of girls eight and 12. When the two met to discuss the procedure, Bertrang warned the agent, "We have to go to this realizing that to alter a female genitalia in any fashion under 18 carries a five-year immediate prison sentence," the FBI affidavit claimed.

During their discussion, Bertrang said Faulkinbury was his "slave" and assisted him in the mutilations, the Associated Press quoted the FBI as declaring. On Tuesday, prosecutor Mark Aveis testified in court that because of images found on Bertrang’s computer, he may also be charged with producing child pornography.

Ironically, despite Bertrang’s claim that he has performed innumerable circumcisions on girls, he and Faulkinbury are charged only with practicing medicine without a license, not with actually mutilating the genitals of any underage girls. As the case is being prosecuted so far, the penalties Bertrang and Faulkinbury face, if convicted, are merely five years in prison apiece.

That light a sentence, said nurse Milos of Forest Knolls, is "ridiculous." Milos is the executive director of the National Organization of Circumcision-Information Resource Centers, which she founded. "Female-genital mutilation is horrendous," she said emphatically.

Female circumcision is so gruesome that most of us try to put it out of our minds. We assume it is so widespread in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia that it cannot be ended. Unfortunately, the US is not immune; immigrants from societies that practice female-genital mutilation tend to bring with them. The pattern has been seen throughout Africa and even in this country, prompting Congress in 1995 to adopt the Prohibition of Female Mutilation Act.

Moreover, there may also be a way to end it in the Third World. Milos referred me to a website maintained by Marianne Sarkis, who heads the FGM (Female-Genital Mutilation) Network. In an article titled Female Genital Cutting, Sarkis describes three types of female circumcisions in Africa and the Middle East, as well as the short-term and long-term harm they can cause.

While most mutilations occur in Muslim societies, they are also performed by Coptic Christians, animists, and even Protestants and Catholics, Sarkis notes.

The mildest version, which the prophet Mohammed is said to have favored, is called sunna circumcision. This operation removes removal of the clitoral hood but not necessarily the clitoris itself. Sunna circumcisions are common in the East African countries of Egypt, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, throughout Central African countries such as Nigeria, and in West African nations such as Sierra Leone and Mauritania. Sarkis says there are also reports of sunna circumcisions in Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Worse than sunna is a clitoridectomy which "involves the partial or entire removal of the clitoris, as well as the scraping off of the labia majora and labia minora," Sarkis writes. "This takes place in countries where infibulation has been outlawed, such as Sudan. Clitoridectomy was invented by Sudanese midwives as a compromise when British legislation forbade the most extreme operations in 1946."

Infibulation or Pharaonic circumcision is the most extreme operation, Sarkis notes. It "consists of the removal of the clitoris, the adjacent labia (majora and minora), and the joining of he scraped sides of the vulva across the vagina, where they are secured with thorns or sewn with catgut or thread. A small opening is kept to allow passage of urine and menstrual blood. An infibulated woman must be cut open to allow intercourse on the wedding night."

Sarkis quotes an East Coast researcher, Fran Hosken, as reporting infibulation is "practiced on all females, almost without exception, in all of Somalia and wherever ethnic Somalis live (Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti). It is also performed throughout the Nile Valley, including southern Egypt and all along the Red Sea coast."

Because most of the operations are performed under unsanitary conditions, the excruciating pain may well be followed by infections, including HIV. Shock and hemorrhaging have been so common that countries like Egypt require female-genital mutilations to be carried out by trained doctors. Far better: a few African countries, such as Uganda and Mali, are trying to eliminate all female circumcision.

"Long-term complications," Sarkis writes, "include sexual frigidity, genital malformation, delayed menarche, chronic pelvic complications, recurrent urinary retention and infection, and an entire range of obstetric complications."

Nurse Milos in Forest Knolls, meanwhile notes the circumcising of boys is also excruciatingly painful. As a nurse at Marin General Hospital 25 years ago, she first realized how much a baby suffers when witnessing a newborn boy being circumcised. "What I saw was so horrific," she recalled. "It was the baby screaming in a way I’d never known before."

Moreover, some male circumcisions – like female circumcisions – have had disastrous results, she noted. On a few occasions, penises have been so badly injured they had to be amputated. And while a clitoridectomy is intended to permanently put an end to a female’s sexual pleasure, circumcision also takes away a significant part of a male’s sexual pleasure, Milos said, noting there are "20,000 to 30,000 erotic-nerve endings" in a foreskin.

Despite the millions of women in Africa and the Middle East who have been circumcised and want the same for their daughters, the practice can be stopped. While people like nurse Milos in the San Geronimo Valley may seem like voices crying in the wilderness, they are just the sort of people that stopping circumcision requires. They are the organizers. Here’s why.

Sarkis noted that for societies who practice female-genital mutilation, "it is required for a proper marriage, for the virtue of the woman, for the honor of her family. Moreover, most [of these societies] until recently would be unaware that other peoples do not do female-genital circumcision and would think that the only people who do not do [it] are unfaithful women or indecent people." For them, the operation is like dentistry, painful but necessary.

"With African women," nurse Milos noted, "we had to educate them to fight their own fight. They don’t like outside feminists telling them what to do." Such resentment has been seen in West Africa where women joined protests against bans on female circumcision.

Notwithstanding female-genital mutilation being a widespread tradition, there are practical ways for stopping it relatively quickly, Sarkis writes. She cites the end footbinding in China as a model for stopping female circumcision. Footbinding has ended during my lifetime although millions of women had practiced it for 1,000 years.

"The practice was beginning about the age of eight to bend the toes under the feet, force the sole to the heel, and tightly wrap the girl’s foot so that as she matured, her feet remained tiny, perhaps a mere five inches in length," Sarkis explained. "Footbinding was painful, dangerous, and disabling.

"Why did the Chinese do it? Again it was necessary for a property marriage, for the virtue of the woman, for the honor of her family." Although the Chinese empire in the 1800s began trying to ban footbinding, it continued until the mid-20th century, when it disappeared in less than a generation.

People like nurse Milos of Forest Knolls have learned from that experience. As summarized by Sarkis, here’s what is necessary:

• Education that informs women that female circumcision is not worldwide and that it causes many health problems.

• Creation of associations whose members pledge to abandon the practice. The size of the association is key because it takes a critical mass to recruit other people.

"A peculiar characteristic of a convention like this," Sarkis explained, "is that even if each individual in the group comes to think that it would be better to abandon the practice, no one individual acting on her own can succeed. Every family could come to think that female-genital circumcision is wrong, but that is not enough. Female-genital circumcision would continue because any family abandoning it on its own would ruin the futures of its daughters. It must be abandoned by enough families at once so that their daughters’ futures are secure."

Last week, Cinemax broadcast The Day I Will Never Forget, which last year won the documentary prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Boston Globe writer Irene Sege notes the film "takes its name from a haunting poem written by a young [Somali] girl named Fouzia. Dressed in a blindingly white party dress with oversized bows, looking no more than 10, Fouzia looks straight into the camera as she shares what she wrote about the day she was forcibly circumcised:

"‘When three women sat and crucified me on the floor, I cried till I had no voice,’ she recites. ‘The only thing I said was, "Mum where are you?" And the only answer I got was, "Quiet, quiet, girl."’"

There are now more than 100 organizations like Milos’ Circumcision Resource Center operating in more than a dozen countries. Yet Friday’s news out of Los Angeles reminds us just how many newborns right here in Marin County are screaming in their wordless minds, "Mum, where are you?"

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Actually, Brian is right...this is a multiculturalism issue. Female circumcision is very common in sub-Sarahan African states. Immigration to the US has increased the incidence of the practice here. These guys were probably trying to create a niche in that market.

Martin, you are once again traumatizing people with that link.

There are some things a person just doesn't need to see. 28 penis-rings on a guy is one of them.

There are some things a person just doesn't need to see. 28 penis-rings on a guy is one of them.

Apparently you did.