Unlike a hospital circumcision, the bris involves the whole family. This is one reason Streiffer prefers the Mogen clamp for circumcisions, which he says is similar to the traditional clamps used by mohelim through the years. "The literal commandment is that fathers should circumcise their sons," he says. "With the Mogen clamp, I’m able to put the clamp on, and then let the father faithfully do the cut. A lot of fathers are very moved by that opportunity."

  When orthodox Rabbi Yossie Nemes, of Metairie’s Chabad Center, sought out a mohel for his own son, he turned to Rabbi Betzalel Marinovsky of Houston, a certified, Israel-trained mohel who flies into New Orleans about 10 times a year to perform the bris. (Other orthodox mohelim come in from Miami and Dallas.)

  Historically, Nemes says, it has been an act of bravery to offer your son for a bris. A circumcision is an indelible mark of Judaism. Earlier this year, when he got up to speak at his own son’s bris, Nemes says he was overwhelmed with emotion. Three thousand years of Jewish culture rendered the rabbi completely silent.

  Which is why, he explains, a bris is fundamentally not just a circumcision. "It is something that we can do before the child can consciously make a decision," he says. "The whole purpose of it is that it is a bond that transcends reason."

Since 1992, Baton Rouge securities broker Jerry Warner has been presenting hour-long talks on the subject of circumcision to church meetings, men’s groups, and childbirth classes. He fills the local libraries with books like Say No to Circumcision!, co-written by Dr. George Denniston, who founded the organization Doctors Opposing Circumcision (DOC). He occasionally gets quoted in newspaper articles and endures angry letters saying he needs professional help.

  But perhaps the primary goal for a growing national movement of activists is to talk about circumcision, and to talk about it a lot. "I’m an intact male," Warner says by way of introduction. "I believe that nature knows best. It’s a very important part of my anatomy."

  Warner’s own path to activism started when he was growing up in rural West Virginia, and the men in his family – almost all of whom were also intact – would go skinny-dipping. Warner noticed the oldest boy in the family, Dale, was different.

  "It took me several years to ask Dale what had happened. He was in the Navy after World War II, stationed in Cuba. He was circumcised by the ship doctor who told him, ‘If you don’t take care of this, you’re going to get the drip.’ So two guys broke down and said they were getting circumcised, and he went along with it. He said it was like getting tattoos."

  Warner works with various anti-circumcision organizations, which nationally include DOC, Mothers Against Circumcision, the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers (NOCIRC), and the National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males (NOHARMM). They operate outside the mainstream, even though their cause is supported by both the medical establishment and most authors of child-rearing books. "If parents ask me," former circumcision advocate Dr. Benjamin Spock once said on a 1988 episode of Nightline, "I would lean in the direction of saying, ‘Leave his poor little penis alone.’"

  So why does circumcision persist? "What we are trying to do is market a normal penis in a foreskin-phobic, sexually sick society, and it’s no easy feat," says Marilyn Milos, a nurse-turned-activist who, after witnessing her first circumcision, founded NOCIRC and launched the first international symposium on the issue in 1989. This week, Milos is in Washington, D.C., to participate in events surrounding the inaugural Genital Awareness Week, which culminates in a lobbying effort to stop Medicaid from funding circumcisions, and a march on the Capitol. The organizations chose this week because April is Child Abuse Month.

  Most activists unabashedly say that routine circumcision should be declared a criminal act, no exceptions. "You’re talking about prophylactically cutting off normal body parts of an unconsenting minor," Milos says. "You’re talking about a human rights violation."  

  That’s a message Oprah won’t touch, Milos says. In fact, she can only name one celebrity who has taken a major stand against circumcision: shock jock Howard Stern, who likens the surgery to "barbarism" and "butchering."

  But without Oprah, there’s always the Internet. Anti-circumcision forces have created exhaustive sites, filled with articles from legal and medical journals. George Hill, a retired Eastern Airlines pilot living in Port Allen, regularly works with Milos and Warner to upload information onto the Web. "The movement has really taken off because of the Internet presence," Hill says.

  With the absence of good medical texts on subjects such as the proper care for the foreskin, doctors often recommend activist sites to their patients. Recently, a few pro-circumcision sites have begun waging a war of the search engines, but even pro-circumcision doctors acknowledge the activists’ success on the Internet. "The organizations who are against circumcisions are getting out more propaganda than the scientists who are presenting the evidence," begrudges Tulane’s Roberts.

  With the propaganda war won, the next step for the anti-circumcision movement is to take it to the courts. Several successful lawsuits in Canada and the United States have been brought against doctors for botched circumcisions. In 1984, doctors at Charity Hospital in New Orleans tried in vain to convince parents to allow them to change the sex of a Lake Charles boy whose penis had been severely burned during a circumcision performed by an LSU resident using an electrosurgical device at W.O. Moss Regional Hospital. A jury awarded the family and the boy $2.75 million, which was eventually assigned in total to the state of Louisiana, says Lake Charles attorney David Fraser, who represented the family.

  The boy is now nearing adulthood. "He has had a number of reconstructive surgeries, so he has a fairly normal-looking anatomy, but no sexual function," Fraser says. He adds that the device used in the procedure now carries a warning not to use it in circumcisions.

   Another headline-grabbing incident occurred in Louisiana last year, when a Baton Rouge man went into Earl K. Long Medical Center for a bypass. He awoke from surgery with a circumcision instead. He has a lawsuit pending against the hospital.

  Cases like these are the specialty of an Atlanta lawyer and anti-circumcision activist named David Llewellyn, labeled by Newsweek Web the "Johnnie Cochran of the Circumcised." For Llewellyn, botched circumcisions aren’t enough. He’s eager to take on the procedure even when it’s done right. In a pending civil case in New York, Llewellyn is representing William Stowell, a 19-year-old man who wishes he wasn’t circumcised and says his mother only signed a consent form because she was knocked out from post-caesarian painkillers.

  "A lot of people have laughed about the Stowell suit, but it’s well-grounded in law," Llewellyn says, speaking by phone from Omaha, Neb., where he is engaged in a suit against a mohel for removing too much skin during a bris. "I have pleaded that no physician can scar a child just for social reasons."

  Llewellyn has handled or is handling 21 circumcision cases, and in one case obtained a $65,000 settlement for a procedure gone wrong. He cites other legal efforts currently underway, such as an attempt to prove that a United States law against female genital mutilation denies equal protection for boys.

  "Circumcision is a two-billion-dollar industry in this country," he says. "Perhaps when there are enough lawsuits, insurance companies can start warning doctors they need to be more careful."

"It’s a very American thing to take things personally," says one anti-circumcision activist, "to take destiny in your own hands."

  He offers these words to describe another form of protest against circumcision: undo the procedure, one penis at a time. At his Second Skin Leather store in the French Quarter and over his Internet site, Jay Borne sells polyurethane Second Skin Foreskin Restoration Cones for $65. "They are made in the United States under laboratory conditions and are packaged right here in New Orleans," Borne says. "I’ve been doing it now for 20 years, and there’s not a day goes by when I don’t get one or two requests nationwide."

  Stretching penis skin over the exposed glans – or uncircumcising – has actually been around since ancient times. Borne got the idea to develop the cones when he met a local medical student who wanted to reverse his own circumcision. The two began a trial-and-error process. "We went to the hardware store and got some foam used for pipe covering, and tried to make up some things with cotton and tape and a bunch of things."

  Inside the cone, taped layers of penile skin are stretched in two directions, both toward and away from the body. It’s not painful, says Borne, who spent a year of his own inside the cone. He now appears to be uncircumcised. "The only thing I’d be more happy with is having never been circumcised in the first place," he says.

  Dr. Jerry Sullivan at LSU takes these procedures seriously. He doesn’t recommend surgery to refashion a foreskin; rather, he sends patients to a Web site for the National Organization of Restoring Men (NORM). "Most of the guys accomplish it through various stretching techniques, and once it’s done, it’s a fairly decent looking foreskin," he says.  In addition to the cones, restoring men can use a weighted ball called the Tugger, and various handmade devices. It’s all worth it, says NORM co-founder and director Wayne Griffiths, who proudly adds that his own sons, both of whom he had circumcised, have kept their own sons intact.

  It was 10 years ago that Griffiths joined the ranks of the uncircumcised. "I started it in October of ’87 and finished by ’90," he says. "Within a few weeks of keeping my glans covered, I got into the shower and released the tape. When that fine spray hit me, I went through the ceiling with delight."

Circumcision in the United States is not likely to change so suddenly as it did in Great Britain. Following a critical 1949 article in the British Medical Journal, the British National Health Service stopped funding routine infant circumcisions. The number of the procedures dropped immediately. In Louisiana, as in most states, Medicaid still pays for circumcisions. So do most insurance companies.

  Meanwhile, at the Tulane Primate Center, Roberts is conducting research that he hopes might ultimately undermine his own support of routine circumcision. "Next week I’m presenting a paper showing how a vaccine might be able to prevent urinary tract infections," he says. "Then we might be able to vaccinate instead of circumcise."

  Activists charge that circumcisions violate Hippocrates’ precept: "First, do no harm." They hope that routine tonsillectomies can serve as a model of a procedure that can be scrapped. Barring that, Tulane’s Reynolds says, she hopes that parents will be informed enough to know that they aren’t making their choice based on medicine, but on culture.

  As attitudes gradually change, doctors, parents and everyone else will have to get used to encountering uncircumcised penises. University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann recently studied attitudes toward penises, and he found that uncircumcised men have a "less varied" sex life. When Elaine Benes on Seinfeld described an uncircumcised penis as having "no face, no personality," she was uttering words likely remembered by countless fathers deciding what to do with their son at birth.

  Despite these prevalent attitudes, David Gollaher believes that change – albeit slow change – is inevitable. "The support for circumcision is eroding for sure," he says. "One reason is simply the population dynamics and changing ethnicity of the United States. If you look at California, whites are the minority, less than 50 percent of the population. All of that is from immigration from Central and South America, and Asia, from countries where circumcision is not common.

  "When this happens," says Gollaher, "the definition of what is normal changes, too."