Tag: Circumcision

The National Post gives more detail on the Israeli woman fined by a rabbinical court for refusing to allow her infant son to be circumcised.

The mother, whose name was given only as Elinor, said her son had been born with a medical problem that prevented him undergoing ritual circumcision on the eighth day after birth, as is customary in Jewish law.

“As time went on, I started reading about what actually happens in circumcision, and I realised that I couldn’t do that to my son.

“He’s perfect just as he is,” Haaretz newspaper quoted her as saying. In their ruling, the three rabbis wrote: “Circumcision is a standard surgical procedure that is performed on every Jewish baby boy, so when one of the parents demands it, the other cannot delay it except where it is proven to be medically dangerous.”

What? That “so” is bogus – what comes after it doesn’t follow from what came before.

One, “standard surgical procedure” is meaningless and deceptive. “Standard” how, in what sense, according to whom, and above all for what medical reason? In other words, no it’s not. Yes it’s “surgical” in the literal sense, and “standard” in the sense that a lot of people do it, but “standard surgical procedure” implies that it’s medically required or at least beneficial, and it’s neither. Two, given the emptiness and deception of that clause, the claim that “the other cannot delay it” is arbitrary and ridiculous. That’s why rabbis as rabbis should have nothing whatsoever to do with ordering people to have their infants cut up.

To put it another way, religious law should never ever be enforced on people who don’t want to be bound by it. That’s because it has no legitimacy derived from this-world principles of representation and universality.

“Fulfilling the command of circumcision is not a [mere] surgical medical act … Brit milah [the rite of circumcision] is exactly what it says: a covenant that God made with His chosen people, the nation of Israel.”

And that is precisely why it can’t be binding on anyone who doesn’t accept it, including believers who don’t accept specific “laws” and “covenants.”

The judgment was upheld by a higher rabbinical court after the mother appealed against the decision. The appeal ruling warned that a verdict in her favour could trigger “a flood of [similar] cases,” giving a “terrifying dimension” to divorce proceedings.

“This trend must be stopped immediately for the common good, which takes precedence over that of the individual,” the judges concluded.

So all the boy infants must have their penises cut “for the common good.” Even though the actual “common good” is very hard to discern.

They added: “Removal of the foreskin prepares the soul [of the baby] to accept the yoke of Heaven and study God’s Torah and commandments.”

All the more reason to refuse! Keep your fucking yoke of heaven and your fucking god’s commandments.

Rabbinical courts are part of Israel’s judicial system and are overseen by the ministry of religious services. In addition to holding exclusive jurisdiction over the marriage and divorce of Jews, they have the power to rule on matters of personal status, alimony, child support, custody and inheritance.

That is terrifying. There is no secular marriage for Jews in Israel, so that means all married Jews in Israel are subject to the power and arbitrary decision-making of rabbis on things like alimony and child custody. All of them! Including the atheists!

Their rulings are enforced by the police and other legal agencies in the same way as those of civil courts.

Terrifying.

The rulings were made against a backdrop of rising concern in Israel over recent attempts in Europe and elsewhere to prohibit ritual circumcision on humanitarian grounds. Israeli officials and rabbis claim the trend is prompted by anti-Semitism.

Israel’s foreign ministry condemned the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe last month after it adopted a resolution calling for regulation of religious circumcision, which is also carried out on Muslim boys shortly after birth.

The foreign ministry demanded that the resolution be annulled, saying it “casts a moral stain on the Council of Europe and fosters hate and racist trends in Europe.”

No, actually, it’s the other way around. Accusing a humanitarian prohibition on cutting infants’ genitalia of fostering hate and racist trends casts “a moral stain” on Israel’s foreign ministry.

In better news – the countries which I think of as Scandinavia plus Finland but which are properly called Nordic (I learned via this story) want to get rid of infant circumcision.

Yesterday, during a meeting in Oslo, Nordic ombudsmen for children, Nordic paediatricians, and paediatric surgeons agreed a resolution urging their national governments to work for a ban on non-therapeutic circumcision of underage boys.

The children’s ombudsmen from the five Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland), along with the Chair of the Danish Children’s Council and the Children’s spokesperson for Greenland, passed a resolution to: “Let boys decide for themselves whether they want to be circumcised.”

Note that it’s just a resolution and that they’re not legislators, but it’s a step. That’s good. This business of snipping at children’s genitals for no good reason has got to stop. The stopping has to start somewhere.

The ombudsmen concluded that: “Circumcision without a medical indication on a person unable to provide informed consent conflicts with basic principles of medical ethics.” They found the procedure “to be in conflict with the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, articles 12, and 24 (3) which say that children should have the right to express their own views and must be protected from traditional rituals that may be harmful to their health.”

Dr Antony Lempert, a GP and spokesperson for the UK Secular Medical Forum (SMF) applauded this historic resolution and urged the UK and devolved Governments to work towards protecting all UK children at risk of forced genital cutting.

He said: “This important statement by the Nordic child protection experts is grounded in common sense. Children’s basic rights to bodily integrity and to form their own beliefs should not be overridden because of their parents’ religious or cultural practices.”

Dr Lempert argued that, “with an increasing awareness of serious irreversible harm caused to boys and girls from forced genital cutting it is time for the genitals of all children to be protected from people with knives and strong religious or cultural beliefs. There can be no justification for healthy children to be forcibly cut. All children deserve society’s protection from serious harm.”

Yes.

But Giles Fraser looks quite thoughtful compared to Ed West in the Telegraph.

…people are not naturally moral relativists, and female circumcision cannot be viewed in any way as an acceptable cultural practice, violating all Western ethical principles, scarring women for life out of sheer spiteful misogyny.

But it’s inevitable that any movement that has been proved right and principled will then push its ideology too far until it too becomes intolerant and ludicrous, and the campaign against male circumcision is just one example. In theory removing a foreskin could be seen as a violation of a child’s rights, but that’s to take a theoretical liberal argument to an absurd and illiberal position. It equates genuinely horrific and immoral alien cultural practices with simply strange ones, which almost becomes an extreme reverse cultural relativism – all cultures that aren’t mine are equally bad.

Absurd and illiberal? To tell parents they can’t snip off a bit of their baby’s penis just because it’s supposed to be a religious obligation? Come on. I can see saying there are tensions, but to blow off the issue that easily is…well, absurd and illiberal.

Of course most people are not saying that circumcision is anywhere as bad as FGM, but that it does mutilate the child and so violate individual rights…But liberalism should mean distinguishing between abusive, unacceptable cultural forms that violate individual freedom and ones you just don’t agree with (which, to some New Atheists, is going to mean pretty much all religious upbringings).

Yes but in what sense is it clear that snipping off a bit of a baby’s penis for non-medical reasons is not an abusive, unacceptable cultural form that violates individual freedom?

I would disagree with Fraser over only one thing – calling this liberalism. It’s actually statism, an ideology that causes far more child cruelty than all the religions in Europe combined.

Ah right, it’s the fault of New Atheism and statism. That’s that sorted.