Circumcision: Should it be illegal?

“Even for San Francisco, this is madness,” said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. City officials have placed a referendum on November’s ballot that would outlaw circumcision, the surgical removal of a boy’s foreskin at birth. Never mind that circumcision happens to be the “oldest practice of the world’s oldest religion” (Judaism), or that the surgery has been shown to reduce the rate of urinary tract infections and sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS. To the 12,000 “intactivists” who signed a petition to get a ban on the ballot, so-called “male genital mutilation” should be a crime, punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail. Female circumcision is already illegal, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial, and rightly so. That abhorrent practice really is mutilation, and carries “terrible long-term consequences” for a woman’s health and ability to enjoy sex. But banning male circumcision—which has no negative health consequences—would be an unacceptable intrusion “on parents’ ability to decide what’s best for children.”

For those of us who are Jewish, said Brad Hirsch­field in WashingtonPost.com, this proposed ban is an assault on our rights as parents and “the free exercise of religion.” I will confess to ambivalence about circumcision myself, but many Jews consider the ritual and family celebration surrounding the procedure to be a “deeply beautiful, 3,000-year-old tradition” that’s essential to the Jewish faith. Putting the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion up for a vote, said Rabbi Gil Leeds in the San Francisco Chronicle, is a threat to the liberty of every American, Jew and non-Jew alike.

Ah, but it’s not quite that simple, said The Economist in an editorial. The Supreme Court has ruled in the past that many religious practices are illegal, such as the polygamy once practiced by Mormons, or the refusal by Christian Scientists to seek medical care for desperately ill children. The critical question is whether male circumcision is harmful, and intactivists argue that cutting off part of an infant’s penis, while he screams in agony, is painful and barbaric. The principle here is simple, said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com. Just as people should be free to choose what religion they follow, men should be free to choose whether or not they have their foreskins surgically removed. “If others can permanently alter your own body without your consent, you really have no freedom at all.”

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