San Diego Group Proposes Male Circumcision Ban in Congress
A San Diego-based group has proposed a bill in Congress that would ban circumcising baby boys, or as the group calls it, Male Genital Mutilation. Many religious groups are very angry that the government would interfere with an religious edict and are examining their options in the courts.
The MGM bill has not yet found a Congressional sponsor and is therefore unlikely to go anywhere in the near future. Nonetheless, it raises important questions about the relationship between the protection of children, gender equality, and religious freedom, questions that have ramifications beyond the proposed bill itself.
Reportedly, at this time, more than half of the baby boys born in the United States undergo circumcision. For most of these infants, a doctor performs the procedure. For a minority, however, circumcision is a religious ceremony. It ordinarily occurs on the eighth day of a Jewish baby's life. For Muslim children, it may occur on the seventh or eighth day of the boy's life, some time in his first five years, or during adolescence.
The ceremony serves, for many Jewish and Muslim families, as both a celebration of their children and an assertion of religious identity. [...]
If circumcision turns out to be what medical professionals are saying that it is -- unanesthetized amputation from a newborn child of living, healthy tissue flush with nerve endings, for no medically beneficial result -- then it might seem quite proper to prevent parents from subjecting their infants to this cruelty.
Yet there is a worry, and it is significant. The worry is that perhaps, out of the many painful things that people do to their children, the law could be singling this one out for prohibition at least in part because the practitioners are religiously motivated, and the religions in question are minority religions in the United States.
There is a troubling precedent for this sort of targeting. In Nazi Germany, for example, the law prohibited Kosher slaughter of animals. Though the treatment of so-called food animals and their slaughter -- Kosher or otherwise -- is indeed extremely cruel, the law in Nazi Germany did not address itself to the whole category of cruelty to the sentient warm-blooded animals who are routinely and unnecessarily killed for food. Rather, it singled out the Jews' religious practice, and it did so out of anti-semitism rather than any true humane concerns for animals.
While a law like this doesnt not explicitly single out Jews and Muslim families, the implicit message is that these minority groups would bear most of the burden of the law.
The [...] concern animates the idea that one way to ensure that the majority does not pass excessively burdensome legislation (in which the costs outweigh the benefits) is to require that the burdens of the law fall equally upon everyone. The equality principle, in other words, protects everyone from overreaching by ensuring that the majority truly experiences the negative consequences of its decisions and will therefore -- on its own -- seek to weigh costs and benefits in an honest fashion.
Its all rather unfortunate that we cant ask the those getting circumcised what they want.
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dem_z
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APR 07, 2005 12:13 PM
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