Photo illustration by Joel McCarthy.
Popular hybrid scarf piece endorsed by Richard Dawkins
By Dylan Hackett, News Editor
Last week, by a worldwide press release, the Humanists for Uncut Humanity announced their unfettered endorsement for the snood, an increasingly popular hybrid renowned for distancing wearers from problems surrounding scarf knots that the HUH claims “nobody can tie properly anyway,” with its simple crocheted circumference. The group heralds the fashion piece as “a woolly plight against the aesthetic of genital mutilation and the pious pragmatism that shields it from rational discussion.”
The press release announced “the snood is an embodiment of our stance against the culturally normalized child abuse known to many as circumcision, but deemed by us as genital mutilation. We encourage our supporters to wear the snood this winter season in solidarity against the practice we seek to cease worldwide. Wear the snood up or down—it is ready to adjust to whichever position the situation requires.”
Evolutionary biologist, author, and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins has been witnessed wearing a beige snood around London and posted a picture through his Twitter account concurrent with the HUH press release. The 71-year-old academic posted on his Twitter page “@HUH reppin’ the #snood hard #topman #swag pic.twitter.com/666rd8da9k”.
The announcement was deemed by many in the press as unsettlingly timely, given the HUH’s “Adopt-an-Anteater” drive launched last November—an effort to provide funding for an anteater shelter in northern Brazil. The long snouted mammal was also adopted as the group’s official mascot at the 2012 Global Atheists Convention, appearing onstage to rally conference attendees behind the HUH’s agenda.
The Creator’s Coalition for Circumcision, a union of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian supporters advocated for infant circumcision and critiqued the backing of the snood in a rebutting press release distributed last Friday.
“Circumcision is a practice dating back as far as Hebrew times and is practiced worldwide as a sanitary precaution for infant health and as a WHO recommended procedure to reducing HIV infection rates. The snood’s resemblance to an uncircumcised penis is negligible and its fervent endorsement by Richard Dawkins and his co-thinkers flouts a respected and long-standing tradition amongst religious and secular communities worldwide. The [HUH]’s stigmatization of the garment causes harm to these cherished communities,” the release claimed.
In an ensuing battle on Twitter late Friday afternoon, the HUH was quick to point out the CCC’s own scandal in the mid-90s where the group was found to have paid the producers of popular Christian family drama, 7th Heaven, to have character Simon Camden don a mushroom cut, a staple of mid-‘90s hairstyles.
