 Check out who's been outside chainsawing… (Not me; Rachel)  |
First, if you want to see something crazy, check out Orbax's page and look at the burn pictures, espcially the first ones… You may not have known this, but you can actually cut his arm off and after about two weeks, another one grows back. It's crazy, I've not seen any other real humans that can do that.
Anyway, I ran a poll a little while back asking, “is it acceptable to cut off a part of your child's genitals?” Not surprisingly, 73% of people said it was never acceptable. 21% would accept it given the right culture, and 6% had no problem with it whatsoever. I followed this up with “is it acceptable to circumcise your child?” Now, it's basically the same question, just asked using different words, but the results were dramatically different — only 47% objected to the idea, with fully 34% having no problem with it whatsoever (19% accepted it given the right culture).
I also ran a follow up poll and it turned out at 14% of people didn't know that circumcision involved the removal of genital tissue (how is that even possible?), and 4% of those refused to believe that it did! My personal take on it is that if someone gets or is given any modification, they should have to be old enough to consent and want it… and that includes circumcision except when medically needed (which is extremely rare of course).
Anyway, I might do a few more experiments in the future seeing how people answer the same question differently depending on how it's worded. For example, I'll bet that if you asked “is it acceptable to kill someone who has committed a very serious crime?” you'd get a different response from “is the death penalty acceptable in the case of very serious crimes?”… And those two are really closely worded.
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