Rising tension over an intimate ritual lays bare a clash between different sorts of entitlement
By B.C.
THINK of an unlikely issue that unites Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, California's Governor Jerry Brown and France's President François Hollande. All three have defended the circumcision of male infants, as practised by Jews and Muslims. The latest intervention took the form of a letter from the Elysee Palace to Joel Mergui, the president of the central consistory of French Jews. "There is no question of placing in doubt an act which is symbolic in Judaism—and in other religions—as long as circumcision is practised within the existing legal framework," Mr Hollande declared, in a missive made public a few days ago.
The presidential letter was one of many strong reactions to a vote on October 1st at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) which seemed to draw some parallels between male circumcision and the vastly more contested practice known these days as female genital mutilation. The resolution expressed concern over a "category of violation of the physical integrity of children, which supporters...tend to present as beneficial...despite clear evidence to the contrary. This includes...female genital mutilation, the circumcision of young boys for religious reasons, early childhood interventions in the case of intersexual children....."
On this point, the French president was clear: "France totally rejects the assimilation [into a single category] of the excision practised on young girls and the ritual circumcision of boys. An unacceptable form of mutilation with heavy physical and psychological consequences for the women who are subjected to it cannot be compared to a ritual practice which is widespread across the world and sometimes encouraged by the medical profession..."
In another response to the PACE vote, an Israeli legislator, Meir Sheetrit, went to Strasbourg this week and told a Council of Europe committee that the health benefits of male circumcision, apparently including a reduced risk of certain cancers, greatly outweighted the risks, such as infection. The Israeli foreign ministry has already described the anti-circumcision resolution (which is non-binding) as a casting a "moral stain on the Council of Europe" and promoting "hate and racist trends in Europe".
Last year Mrs Merkel raised her voice in defence of male circumcision after a local court in Cologne ruled that the circumcision of young boys amounted to the illegal infliction of bodily harm. Amid warnings from the chancellor that Germany could become a "laughing stock" if it outlawed such a basic religious rite, the federal legislature passed a law to protect the practice, as long as parents were informed about the slight risks.
California's Governor Brown signed a law in 2011 that stopped local authorities from banning male circumcision. This was in response to a growing movement in San Francisco to force a ballot which would have criminalised the practice of the ritual on minors. The Bay Area is a stronghold of a campaign known as "intactivism" started by men who say they were traumatised, psychologically as well as physically, by being circumcised in infancy.
It's hard to think of an issue that brings together so many of the passionate concerns of our times. On one hand, we hear a lot about cultural rights—the right of communities defined by religion, language or ethnicity to practise customs and rituals which give meaning to life. The 1993 Vienna declaration on human rights speaks of the right of all peoples (note the collective) freely to "pursue their economic, social and cultural development" and it stresses that "persons belonging to minorities have the right to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion...."
At the same time, especially in advanced democracies, the individual's right to dispose of his/her own body is held ever-more sacred: the right to make personal sexual choices, to change gender, and indeed to end one's own life.
The awkward thing is that all cultures and religions have things to tell us about what we should do with our bodies, and our children's bodies. You can't believe unconditionally in both cultural rights and individual bodily rights, and the issue of circumcision is only one extreme case of that dilemma. In practice, most of us deal with that problem by gut feeling or intuition. Our intuition tells us that the circumcision of baby boys is probably okay, at worst harmless and culturally very important to some religions, while the excision practised on baby girls in some cultures certainly is not okay.
