First, you have the committed hundreds of millions of sincere, well-intentioned religious people, for whom circumcision is part of the tradition around which their lives and their cultures are constructed.

Add to that the peculiar, largely unexamined, and certainly poorly understood original reason(s) behind the cutting of the penis. Psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists have all had a go at figuring out why we started doing it in the first place. Circumcision, it turns out, is an ancient practice (the pharaonic Egyptians did it) and a global practice (Australian aborigines did it). Nobody has figured out why.

Some possibilities which have been suggested:
     --male envy and imitation of menstruation;
     --puritanical desire to desensitize the penis;
     --a primitive, intuitive form of disease control;
     --esthetic improvement;
     --an outward and visible sign of specialness.

Various groups, at various times, have been committed to the cutting for some or all of those reasons. Victorian doctors in America and Great Britain, for example, saw circumcision as a way to reduce masturbation. And of course today Muslims and Jews still see the cut as a reminder of covenant with the deity. In America now, some parents have it done so their kid will not look "different."

This wide variety of poorly understood motivations results in two powerful social factors, which are still very much in play:

1. Any discussion, no matter how well reasoned, opposed to circumcision instantly produces a loud, instant, and wholly unreasoned response from the various communities committed to the practice.

2. Any development which seems to support the value of circumcision finds an automatic and very large support group ready to rally to the cause.

Circumcision and AIDS
Into this fray now comes AIDS, with all its cultural (mainly homophobic, but also puritanical) baggage.

The analyses of AIDS occurrence in Africa do tend to indicate that a circumcized man has a significantly lower chance of getting the HIV virus. Given the weakness of the anti-circumcision forces, it seems likely that we will see a new wave of male cutting appear in Africa, no doubt optional in some countries but legally mandated in others.

And the world will go on in its bloody, infant-abusive way.

Health care professionals will feel good: they are, through a simple surgical technique, reducing the level of misery and disease in the poorest parts of the planet. Pharmaceutical conglomerates will be off the hook: they won’t have to worry about the possibility that they might be forced to sell their HIV-controlling drugs at or below cost to reduce that same level of misery and disease. The religious supporters of circumcision will secretly feel better: they will have a new, wholly practical reason to continue to cut.

At this point, we are left with two puzzles.