Circumcised & Conservative
There are some men who were circumcised as infants, and who are very, very angry about it. They can never forgive their parents for making what they see as an unwise and unwelcome decision without their input. Although having a foreskin is something that was never part of their personal awareness, or which is part of their own memory, they miss it as though their most treasured possession has been wrenched from their grasp.
There's a similarity with many political reactionaries here: they long for the Good Ol' Days and all the things that have since been "taken away from them", particularly those things that were never part of their own, personal experience, and which, therefore, were never actually taken away from them. The loss of things that were never theirs to being with are the losses they seem to feel most keenly.
Recently we watched (on DVD) the movie "Silver City". There is a scene in which the reactionary business bigwig (who's footing the bill for his candidate's run for governor) is sharing thoughts and strategy with his dim-witted and reactionary candidate. They are riding horses, walking slowly through grasslands at the foot of breathtakingly beautiful mountains.
The Senator sweeps his arm around and complains about how "all this land was taken away from us by pencil-pushers in Washington". As he talks, he turns the generalized "us" into "me", taking it very personally that he can't build housing developments or strip mine on Federal lands as should be his right as a free American. "It just ain't right!" he claims about this land that was taken from him (or "us"). This was land that was never his in the first place, but he feels its loss keenly.
One can see this attitude all around, and in the most curious places: people (to be fair, always men) from The Confederate States who still aren't over "their" loss in the Civil War and simply can't accept the oppression of The Yankees, althought the war ended a century before they were born; white supremacists who fondly remember the day they never knew when the 'inferior races' knew their place; and my personal favorite, homophobic men who shed a tear now and again over the loss of the word "gay", despite the fact that "gay" has referred to "homosexual" since long before they were born, not to mention that they really have no idea how to use the word in a complete sentence anyway.
Again, I guess I'm faced with all questions and no answers for a phenomenon I don't really understand: reactionary conservatives' unlimited capacity to work themselves up into a frenzy over the loss of something that they never had and never knew in the first place. Righteous indignation can be so confounding. I suppose I wouldn't think it important, either, if only Republican politicians weren't so likely to exploit it.