2012-08-08 The Punch - We must bring religion in on the push to ban circumcision

[Minuteman]

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/...-circumcision/

Excerpts:

In June, a regional appellate court in Cologne, Germany determined that performing circumcision on a male child for religious reasons, even with parental consent, constitutes a criminal assault and violates the child’s right to bodily integrity.

The decision which did not constitute a ban, stated that circumcision “irreparably and permanently” changes the body of the child. The Court balanced the rights of the child to bodily integrity and to decide his religious beliefs, against the parents’ constitutional religious freedoms and right to educate their child in religious matters.
...
On one view, the Cologne decision is nothing new. But its ripple effect suggests a considerable shift in attitudes. Back in 1993, the Queensland Law Reform Commission used similar language to the Landgericht in a Research Paper, concluding that “routine circumcision of a male infant” could be “a criminal act” partly because it is “invasive, irreversible and major surgery and for non-therapeutic purposes”. The Commission proposed that parental consent may be invalid since the common law (Marion’s Case) restricts parents’ ability to consent to non-therapeutic treatment of children.
...
As a culturally Jewish advocate aligning myself with calls for reform, someone, somewhere, may cast accusations of self-loathing anti-Semitism. Such accusations are primitive and should be summarily dismissed. They have nothing to do with the relative merits of the argument outlined and everything to do with an ad hominem reflex designed to intimidate debate into silence.
...
As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I find such invocations reckless, because they conflate the historical specificity of Nuremberg Laws under fascism with the functions of a healthy judiciary in a democracy.