- The Rumor:
- There's a massive difference between body and ear piercings. For a start, the aftercare is vastly more intense/difficult with some body piercings. The nose, for example, is notoriously hard to heal and can be problematic/painful for years after the initial piercing. There's also a huge cultural difference. In most cultures, ear piercings are completely by-the-by, to the point where you don't even register if people have them. Body/facial piercings are a lot less common and can provoke mixed reactions, including preventing the person from being able to get some jobs.
Ah yes. We get to the final point. It's not so much that it's about the child's body or it's ability to make informed decision. Not even about the pain. You think that there is no other place on the body where you could jam a needle and have it pass relatively as safe as through the ear? Or maybe it's a lot more discreet if we pierce its ear than somewhere on the face? Fine, pierce your kid's butthole or something, that's pretty discreet, no one's gonna look for it there on the job interview (I hope).
It's not about any of those things really. It's because earrings are more socially acceptable, somewhere they are tradition so on and so forth. And things that are socially acceptable aren't things that are deeply firmed in objectivity or rationality, things that we should strive to form laws around - they are based on habit and things we're used to. Some ancient dudes, a whole lot of years ago decided something's a ok based on some ridiculous notion that would today, get them arrested faster than a horny sociopath in a trench coat taking a stroll through the kindergarten. And we got used to it, so that's fine today, even though it collides with some principles and rights we have today, ones that are formed indiscriminately, rationally and objectively (or at least that was the idea behind making them).
If we suddenly got conquered by the dormant Martian civilisation and they ruled the world for say, 500 years, during which time they make it a legal obligation to chop off your and your offspring's butt cheeks so you could sit in their specially designed Martian slave chairs, what would we do later, when the Invaders die after listening to too much Prodigy and get beaten by the heroic microorganisms? Chances are, we'd keep lopping off our progeny's rear ends on the habitual basis. Because after 500 years or more of tradition, having the entirety of your arse attached would probably be very much out of the ordinary, possibly obscene or highly socially unacceptable. So we'd keep mangling the future generations even though it would be conflicting with the principles of our society.
And that's the only problem I have with this whole thing. Our law making parameters are not exactly in place. We are still very likely to base a law on social acceptability and tradition, instead of rationality and attempt at justice.
(and before someone jumps at me for making invalid examples and comparisons, don't. The point was to exaggerate a little in order to accentuate the violation of a principle, rather than just show how earrings on kids should be illegal. They shouldn't be. Or they should be. I don't care. But it's contradictory to some of our other laws and principles, is all I'm trying to say)