by STEVEN MAZIE
When a German court in Cologne ruled last month that baby boys could not be circumcised for religious reasons, Jewish and Muslim groups erupted in protest while a chorus of voices arose to defend the ruling. Walter Russell Mead denounced the development as a sign that “it is now once again a crime to be a Jew in the Reich.” Brian Earp applauded the decision on moral grounds: “it is unethical to remove healthy tissue from another person’s body without first getting his permission,” he wrote. Religious freedom should not serve as an “excuse” for “mutilating your baby’s penis.”
I propose that everyone try to calm down. Removing a baby’s foreskin should not provoke a criminal investigation under international human rights law, but bris defenders need to do a better job of explaining their position to a non-religious audience.
When they use terms like “mutilation” to describe the removal of a tiny piece of skin and suggest that circumcision is an “enormity” for which the death penalty may be insufficient punishment, anti-circumcision activists are pushing the debate in a hysterical and needlessly provocative direction.
At the same time, defenders of ritual circumcision err by framing their argument in exclusively theological terms. When Abraham Foxman describes the brit milah (the Hebrew term for the circumcision ceremony on a Jewish baby’s 8th day of life) as “a fundamental and ancient precept of Judaism…one of the most sacred elements of the Jewish religion,” he argues that banning circumcision would be the ultimate affront to Jews. God tells us we have to circumcise our boys, the argument goes, so our country must permit us to do so.
This claim is rhetorically strong but insufficient, as a recent video exchange between Brian Earp and Ari Kohen illustrates. After Kohen proposes a distinction between the biblical mandate behind male circumcision and the merely cultural justification for female genital cutting in some Muslim countries — and argues, on this basis, that the former should be permitted while the latter should not — Earp asks a very tough question:
“If it could be convincingly argued that…there was in fact a religious mandate that Allah had required female genitals to be cut into in a certain way, then that seems to you to be a legitimate reason for the practice to be carried out on a wide scale in societies that are governed by Islamic belief. Is that the case?” (drag to the 9:00 minute mark)