Several months back I wrote a lengthy piece for Nikki Stern's www.doesthismakesense.com on the self-styled Intactivist Movement and its effort to place on the ballots in San Mateo and San Francisco referendae that it hoped would ban circumcision in those jurisdictions.

      Here's the End-Game.

     This past July a Superior Court Judge, in response to requests from dozens of Muslim, Jewish, and secular medical and constitutional rights organizations, cut down the ballot initiative saying that only the state (and not cities, towns, villages, one-mule farms, or sincere-but-sincerely-lunatic pop-culture movements) could create or slice into medical law.

     Now, the California legislature has dealt the death cut to the Intactivists. It has passed (and Governor Jerry Brown has signed) a bill that will prevent any further potential circumcision bans. Muslim and Jewish groups in the state are celebrating their joint victory, as a ban would have struck at the root of their first amendment freedom of religious expression.

     With all California foreskins now saved by this joint Muslim and Jewish effort, it cannot be long in coming that we'll see a rise in overall interreligious cooperation toward peaceful resolutions to all of our long, drawn-out, pent-up problems.