German Court Rules Circumcision Illegal

riellox,

Here in the USA the vast majority of circumcisions are done because of tradition, not religion. One would think that it would be easier to stop circumcision when it does not usually carry the force of religion behind it; when you can plainly show parents that this tradition unnecessarily robs the boy of an important part of his penis.

I understand that Muslims are relative newcomers to most of Europe, but in parts of the Balkans and Greece and a few isolated places in Spain they have been around for hundreds of years and Jews have lived in Europe for two millenia.
So it begs the question, why not make the rules apply only to natives and leave the ethnic minorities to their own devices?

For most of this time, these strangers in our midst have carried out their peculiar customs in their ghettos. Maybe the nature of modern life puts these ethnic groups more in conflict with native Europeans and modern transportation brings more of them into your midst.

Government in liberal social democracies takes a more active role in child welfare than in generations past. In some cases, I think it has gone too far. Here in the USA, naturists are sometimes falsely accused of child abuse because the entire family wears no clothes in the privacy of their home.
We don't want the government telling us to wear clothes until our own children leave the house at the onset of adulthood.

But naturism does not make irreversible changes in the bodies of children. Even our allover tans fade when winter arrives.

It seems to me that we can't give religions carte blanche to do whatever they please in the name of freedom. Even in a free society, one freedom (the right to raise your children as you see fit, comes into conflict with the freedom of the children to choose whether to allow cuts on their bodies.
Unless you want children to be taken away from parents at birth and raised entirely by the state, there must be some allowance for parents to teach their values to children.
But circumcision is by its very nature a unique change in the body of a fundamental nature. I know that some cultures engage in ritual scarification as a rite of passage.
That too permanently identifies you as a current or former member of some cultural group. But painful though they might be at the time, scarification does not affect sexual performance.

Millions will disagree with me, but religion has overstepped its bounds when it cuts off a functioning part of our reproductive system. And I want to give people as much religious freedom as possible, but this has gone too far.

 

GardenGuy = to say that it effects sexual performance is correct... to say whether that effect is good or bad is way to hard to determine. I have read a lot on this topic over the last few days and the best I can come up with is this:

1) There is no NECESSARY reason for it because of modern soaps and cleaning products
2) There is no conclusive evidence that is it harmful to have it done.

I know many people disagree with that last statement but I spent some time reading several studies and like I said in my last post, almost all of them say that they are not finished, do not have enough information, and they are not conclusive.

I actually respect the approach you took here though. Many people just go off bashing on religion in general, and it is nice to find people who focus on the issue at hand, and don't just blame all of religion as being horrible.

And I keep thinking of two other common practices in America: immunization and abortion. Both of these leave changes in the body, one in chemistry, and the other dead. Should we outlaw these as well?

Should we force people who are Christian Scientists to take their children to the doctor when they get sick? I personally think their practices are ridiculous and in some cases can be classified as child abuse, but this is part of the gray area. Where do we draw the line?

If we can prove that circumcision has a permanent "negative" effect, than we should do something about it. right now some evidence is there that it COULD cause negative effects, but so can vaccines, and I see medicines on TV every day that list negative side effects that even include death. So right now the research is just not there to outlaw it, and there is still research that shows that it can have beneficial effects.

 

I totally agree with the reasons behind the outlawing of juvenile circumcision, and agree that the German Government were right to do so. However, I can't see that the enforcement is going to be quite so simple. After all, at best, it's obvious that the fanatics will simply take their children to be circumcised in a country that permits the procedure, and at worst you will get Rabbis / Imams performing the operations in the backs of cars, etc., using the same crude methods from the Biblical days when the whole thing first began.

Quite honestly, I find it hard to understand how anyone in this day & age can still be led so drastically by the superstition of imaginary 'Gods'.

 

I think the problem is not that some people believe in the existence of a supreme being, but that their faith is constrained to a manner of worship that is no longer appropriate for our time and culture.

There is a book that I have been meaning to read: "Your God is too Small".
The key idea of the book is that God is not the problem, rather our small way of thinking about him is. Maybe God is way bigger than we imagine, perhaps bigger than we can even try to imagine.

So if there is a Supreme Being, why would he want the whole world (at least the male half) to cut off part of what this Being created?
But if practitioners of these tribal religions want to go against nature and cut off their foreskins, they can either do it in another country or wait until adulthood.

I know that Germany's history with non-ethnic Germans in their midst makes them an easy target for criticism when they pass a law against circumcision, but when you are defending the rights of minor children, you can't shy away from justice because it appears to discriminate against minorities.

 

fix the quotes you morons

quit cutting off pieces :d

 

Okay, so Germans still hate jews.. I expected this much.

 

What does this have to do with jews, it's more of a human right to have control over your own damn body.

 

I was joking. I'm more concerned about our rights being taken here in America, than I am about Germany. But how many people "decide" to get circumcised anyway? Seems like the parents choose that for them.

 

You mean the United States I believe , For some reason some people believe America is a country not a continent, kinda like Africa.

 

Well yeah. America isn't either a continent nor a country. North America and south America. But we call the USA "America" because it's in the title.

 

My grandfather was a WWII surgeon who was stationed in Australia and later the Philippines. He once told me the most common procedure he had to perform on his patients (all of them soldiers) was adult circumcision; they didn't have the luxuries and utilities of clean water soap on a daily basis. Life throws you a draft card and look what happens. I say just get cut and face a zero percent risk of an infection that could have been prevented from circumcision.

 

It's interesting.

liberal/non authoratarian socialists believe in absolute freedom in the sense of no victimless crimes, for something to be limited it must harm another.

Right wing "libertarians" believe in freedom for them, but fuck anyone who wants an equal freedom, it's cool to go corporate-thieving or cutting up baby dicks.

I guess if that baby deserved to not have it's dick chopped on, it would be strong enough to fight off a circumcision, because that's how right libertarianism works..... you can have what you can take.

 

Wow this is condescending.. I don't think any libertarian would agree with that at all.

 

I will be honest here, I have had Phimosis over five times and got over it. The skin stretched out and became normal over time. I never once thought of disfiguring myself to feel normal.