Prof. Jordan Peterson shot to fame when he refused to accept rules that dictated the words a person must speak. It’s not that he would not choose to use the words demanded of his own volition, but rather that a person should not be coerced to say them against their will.

Sadly there are authoritarians everywhere, people who are not content with ignoring your dissenting opinion, but who make it their mission to make you say or do the things you don’t agree with. Take the recent Florida case – a mother objects to her son being circumcised, the father has a different opinion, the court has sided with the father.

But rather than ruling to simply ignore the mother’s wishes, to overule her, to go ahead with only the father’s consent, they jailed her and threatened her with indefinite jail time if she didn’t sign a document giving her consent.

Leaving the circumcision issue aside for now – how is this different to a forced marriage, or a contract signed under duress? They would have called her failure to consent ‘contempt’, but then gave sole authority to the boy’s father for all medical decisions anyway. Surely, then, they didn’t need the mother’s consent at all.

That type of behaviour I have seen, but I do not understand it. To actually force her to ‘say words’ she disagrees with, to sign consent she hasn’t given, rather than simply overrule, seems perverse on a whole new level.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/heather-hironimus-intactivist-mom-who-took-son-into-hiding-to-save-his-foreskin-sobs-in-court-as-she-signs-consent-for-circumcision