The Cologne district court has ruled that non-medical circumcision is a “serious and irreversible interference in the integrity of the human body”. Thus religious circumcision is illegal and German Jews and Muslims are up in arms about it.
Well done to Germany, and the Cologne court in particular, for making a decision based upon child welfare despite the inevitable chorus of claims that it’s anti-semitic. Commenters were straight in with the other obvious non-argument- bringing abortion into the mix despite the two issues being unrelated. British blogger Cranmer waffled around the subject but basically said that laws made up in the desert thousands of years ago should be more important than the ones passed in a modern courtroom, and suggested some sort of circumcision tourism.
Let’s leave decisions about the integrity of the prepuce to its owner and let them choose at the age of eighteen plus whether it stays or goes.
The arguments for and against circumcision for aesthetic or purported health benefits are beside the point. What is the point is that a special part of my body was stolen from me as an infant and from many other infant boys past, present, and as things stand, in the future too for no valid medical reason, and without any consideration of my personal opinion or that of all the other infant boys that those foreskins were and will be attached to. It may have been/will be sanctioned by my parents and those of many other infants for cultural or religious reasons or whatever, but it is/was not their body and they should not be legally allowed to give permission for the theft of part of another’s body for non therapeutic reasons. If it was any other part of the body of the child that was proposed to be cut off serious questions would be asked, and yet the foreskin is mysteriously regarded as dispensable for some reason by many, despite the fact that it is much appreciated by the majority of men in the UK and the rest of the world who were allowed to retain it and are not queuing up in their droves to have it removed. Infant boys should be afforded the same legal protection as infant girls against the whims or rites of those parents who would choose to impose irreversible physical modification of the genitalia of their infant sons, who lack the capacity to speak out against it for themselves. I salute the decision of this court for taking another step along the road toward a fairer society.