Since peaking at 85% of newborn males in 1965, America's future doctors, football players, garbage men, and concert pianists have been losing much of the length of their penile skin at an increasingly low and alarming rate. In 2003, only 56% of America's baby boys were circumcised. That means that nearly half of every male high school graduate in the class of 2021 will have never experienced the resolute feeling of a cloth towel brushing against their tough helmet after a shower, and will never feel the exquisite chafe of boxer shorts under a full suit for a long day.

Now I know some of the for-skinners out there will say “but we don't want to do it for religious and cultural reasons,” and I agree with them. Failing to remove your baby boy's foreskin at birth is perfectly understandable if done for deeply held religious reasons, like if you're an atheist, a Satan worshiper, or a hippie. It's also reasonable to let your little guy keep all of his little guy for tribal or cultural reasons, as do the Luo and Turkana tribes of Kenya, or the French, Dutch, and Belgians, who use their seemingly limitless supply of smegma as lantern oil and in a seasonal dish known as “Le Kruid La Vie”, which loosely translated to English means “The Spice Of Life”. But for freedom-loving, hard-working, God-fearing Americans, permitting the prepuce to prevail is packed with problems.

First, if you don't teach a boy in his first few days of life to fear the hand of authority (especially when he's tied down, and the hand has a knife), that opportunity is lost forever. The first week or so after birth is when you really need to show them who's boss. Once they grow up, all you can do is take away their supper, their allowance, or the car keys, but it will never work because they'll always know they can eventually get those things back. Infancy is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Do you want your sons to grow up to be fans filing in formation from Football in Fargo, or swarms of stampeding smelly savages smashing street-lamps after soccer in Spain? You don't need to be Mr. Spock to figure that one out.

Second, medical science tells us that the male foreskin is the most densely innervated erogenous zone of the body. With American kids already scatterbrained by lust and falling further and further behind their Asian counterparts in math and science, falling circumcision rates are an increasing challenge to our already stressed educational system. When the only thing students remember from algebra is where the cute girls were sitting, we simply cannot afford the distraction of an extra 300 square inches of sexually sensitive penile skin in the classroom. But problematic as the intact penis is in the classroom, it's even worse in the locker room, where there aren't any cute girls, if you catch my drift. Think about that before you let some anti-circumcision zealot try to convince you that God didn't drink a few too many Bloody Mary's the day he sketched Adam on the drawing board.

Now, if you're among those parents-to-be who are impervious to the logical arguments for truncating that trouble-making trouser troll, then consider the aesthetics: In it's natural state the penis is just plain ugly. That's why men like to look at womens genitals more than women like to look at mens. Circumcision can't completely level that playing field, but it's a start. I mean, have you ever seen a non-neutered house-cat? Let's face it, external genitalia is quite an eyesore. If testicles weren't needed to produce future generations, conscientious parents would slice off that unsightly ball-sack faster than a medieval stable boy groping the king's daughter.

And then, of course, there's the hygiene issue. Unlike it's female counterpart, the genitals of the sheathed adult male are unsanitary even when rinsed daily with soap and water, and we all know how likely that is. Far from the sweet scent of country flowers, a summer's eve, or a fresh mountain breeze sported by genitals of the fairer sex, even a surgically trimmed penis typically smells like a cross between a horse stable, sour cottage cheese, and, poetically, aged sausage, but an uncircumcised member is truly an olfactory force of nature that needs to be snipped in the bud before it can become a public hazard.

Finally, neonatal circumcision is good for the American economy. Billions of dollars in economic activity are at risk due to the continuing slide in the circumcision rate. Circumcision itself is more than a billion dollar per year industry to doctors, hospitals, and specialized foreskin crushing tool manufacturers alone, but that's just the tip of it. Circumcision supports the economy in countless secondary ways, including everything from lubricants, high thread-count underwear, slip on foreskin replacements, foreskin restoration products, and treatment of surgical complications arising from botched circumcisions. But even that's just the beginning of the importance of neonatal circumcision to the economic health of the nation. A multi-billion dollar industry has sprung up to harvest human tissue for use by pharmaceutical companies, private bio-research firms, and others which create much needed and lucrative products from them, like replacement skin for grafting. If most American males kept their foreskins, these companies would be forced to offer a substantial price for this scarce commodity in a tight market. That would reduce their profits, and potentially reduce the Gross National Product even more than all those wrinkly uncivilized snufalupaguses would raise it.

Setting aside all the overwhelming aesthetic, economic, religious, hygienic, and lust controlling reasons to put your baby in that little soundproofed room and go sit in the comfortable lobby for a half-hour and enjoy a refreshing soft drink, there's one final reason why it's absolutely essential that you get rid of that funky penis covering at birth: Adult males simply don't have the guts to do it (to themselves). Experts say that only 3 in 1,000 men not circumcised at birth choose to have the procedure. Those odds aren't very good.

Are you willing to let your son take that risk?