I’m finding myself dismayed by the directions the debates brought on by a German court’s ruling – that the circumcision of male infants (which I will refer to as male genital mutilation or MGM from now on) is a criminal assault – are most often taking. I concede that a court criminalizing a practice that is considered important by two religions, Judaism and Islam, which the (clearly Christianly biased) country in question has historically had and still has a complicated and difficult relationship with, is problematic. But this is also where the discussions take the wrong turn.

The male foreskin is a highly sensitive, sexually functional and useful organ that protects the glans on the penis. Cutting it off an individual who can’t consent to the procedure for any reason other than a medically necessary one is an assault. Whether that non-medical reason is aesthetic, cultural or religious is irrelevant. This is purely an issue of individual freedoms and rights, of human rights, not of religious or cultural battles. Now, some may argue that human rights are a debatable thing that was “invented” by people from a certain cultural background and thus need not also apply to everyone else. I think they couldn’t possibly be more wrong. I contend that human rights are not an invention, but a discovery. Human suffering is universal, and it’s precisely what human rights are intended to ease. Human suffering and its avoidance aren’t inventions of a certain group of people, they’re universal facts.

An individual that lived in a culture in which religion demanded their parents cut off its little finger on its left hand would have no less a right not to have it cut off than an individual living in Central Europe. That cutting off their finger would be part of that culture is irrelevant. I think most people who defend male genital mutilation would agree on this. Why is there such a doublestandard? Why is it not deemed acceptable to cut off a child’s little finger in the name of culture/religion, but cutting off part of a male child’s genitals is? My best educated guess is that it’s because of a mixture of fear of being perceived as racist, anti-semitic and/or eurocentric and a culturally and religiously ingrained undervaluation of sexuality and genital integrity. According to Jews Against Circumcision “Rabbi Moses Maimonides himself acknowledged that circumcision is done to desensitize the penis and curb masturbation.” A religion having toxic issues with sexuality… Why am I not surprised?

When I was recently debating this with a friend, he contended, that the amount of suffering experienced by an individual also depends on the context in which such a ritual is performed, on its symbolism and the severity of its consequences, and that the individual suffers less when those symbols carry weight to them. This is true of course, if the individual identifies with those rituals and symbols. Whether that will be the case for the adult man or whether he will view his circumcision as a loss is impossible to predict. What do we tell those men? Should we say “Oops, hard luck, but the religious views of other people were more important than how you might feel about this some day.”? Small children don’t have any religious views and feelings. They only develop them with time, and it is only then they become capable of making a decision that is right for themselves.

What about religious and cultural freedom then? Cultures and religions don’t suffer, humans suffer. For a society to be humane, the individual must be valued above abstract constructs and rituals. Religious freedom doesn’t include a fool’s license. It allows people to freely practice their own religion, not to force it on somebody else, and definitely not to inflict bodily injury on another individual. Religions often have a dangerous disregard for these kinds of boundaries – MGM is just one of them – and our society is still dangerously compliant with them. If you beat your child, you can go to jail. But if you cut off an infant’s foreskin in the name of culture and religion, it’s suddenly all not as bad anymore.

Parents’ lacking sense of their children as individuals instead of their property or an extension of themselves is a big problem in this. The reasoning often goes that, as children are supposedly theirs, they can indoctrinate them into their religion as they wish and do to them whatever their god demands. There’s the dangerous notion that there are Christian children, Muslim children, or [insert religion] children. There are no Christian, Muslim or Jewish children. They are children of Muslim parents, children of Jewish parents or children of Christian parents, and those children may or may not grow up to believe the same things as their parents.

It is only the individual this must ultimately be all about. Not cultures, religions, regions, or parents, but solely the affected individual. The individual must have the freedom to decide on their own whether they want to submit to certain cultural or religious practices or not. The individual cannot, must not, be considered the property of a culture, religion, or its parents. People are so concerned about not appearing racist, anti-semitic, eurocentrist, and whatnot that everything is being discussed but the freedoms and rights of the affected individual.

Sources:
Jews Against Cirumcision
Male Genital Mutilation (MGM) on Wikigender
Circumcision is an affront to decent human behaviour

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