I guarantee it:

A pediatric urologist at Cornell—Dix Poppas—has been operating on little girls with what he judges to be oversized clitorises, cutting away important clitoral tissues, and then stitching the glans to what remains of the shaft.

[...]

At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch... Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls...

Let's make no bones about it: This is extremely disturbing. Extremely so.

First of all, we have medically sanctioned genital mutilation going on here. Second of all, we have a doctor doing something that walks a pretty fine line with an act that would, absent the "medical" rationale, come very close to straight-up molestation-- and, as Dan Savage rightly notes, fairly purposeless molestation, from the girls' perspectives (if their sensation has been diminished, what's the doctor going to do about it? Nothing, that's what).

At the end of the day, we live in a society where the generally accepted rule is that parents make medical decisions for their kids. But we also live in a society whose laws do not tolerate child abuse....

I've long maintained that Democrats are just as prone to infringing on Americans' civil liberties as Republicans, and very frequently in the name of combating terrorism-- something more associated with Republicans in the public's mind, probably thanks to the very aggressive (and in my view often problematic) approach taken by the Bush administration, with the vocal support of key Republicans in Congress.

But today comes a reminder that Democrats aren't really all that much better. Right now, under a sitting Democratic President (a self-professed constitutional law professor who talked up civil liberties a lot before flip-flopping and voting in favor of "FISA Reform" in 2008), we have a situation in which an American citizen, born in this country, has effectively been exiled by our government because he's on the no-fly list (which, I might add, has proven over the years to be littered with errors, including the placement of Ted Kennedy's name on it) and because government bureaucrats can't get creative regarding things like, you know, maybe bringing him home handcuffed:

... the case of Yahya Wehelie is really just outrageous beyond belief. Keep in mind as you read that he's a U.S. citizen born and raised in Virginia:...