IL FAUT INTERDIRE LA CIRCONCISION DES ENFANTS

Germany drafts new law to "protect sacred rite" of circumcision, but secular delegation to the UN takes an opposing view


Germany's cabinet has approved a draft law protecting the right to circumcise infant boys, aiming to end months of legal uncertainty after a local court banned the practice, causing a backlash from Muslim and Jewish groups.
 
The June ruling by a Cologne district court that circumcision constituted "bodily harm" sparked an emotional international debate about religious freedom and the procedure itself.

The German government was accused of anti-Semitism, a charge with a particular resonance for Germans. It was also accused of "Islamophobia" and under this pressure pledged to bring in new legislation by the autumn to restore the right of parents to mutilate their son's penis if it was on religious grounds.
"It was always our intention to lift this ruling," government spokesman Steffen Seibert said.

Parliament must still approve the bill for it to become law.
The speed with which national MPs agreed to draw up a new law underscored sensitivity to charges of intolerance in a country haunted by its Nazi past.
German chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany risked becoming a laughing stock if Jews were not allowed to practise their rituals. The bill states that the operation should take place with the most effective pain relief possible and only if parents have been fully informed about the nature of the procedure. The court ban had applied only to the Cologne region but doctors across Germany refused to carry out operations fearing the risk of legal action.

Dr Antony Lempert of the Secular Medical Forum said: "Senior German politicians appear so terrified of offending religious adults that they have lost sight of first principles. Every person should have the right to bodily integrity and to be protected from harm. It should be absolutely unthinkable that a child's genitals could be surgically modified according to its parents' religious or cultural beliefs.

"It seems that the wrong lesson has been learned from the horrors of the Holocaust. Vulnerable people should be protected from the harm caused by those with forceful ideology demanding total cultural obedience. That the German Government should heed the tenuous claims made by Jewish and Muslim leaders that it is they who are being persecuted is shameful. The SMF applauds the Cologne court decision in its straightforward intent to prevent serious, irreversible harm to innocent children."

Last week, Dr Lempert, IHEU's Roy Brown and the NSS's Keith Porteous Wood discussed infant (and therefore non-consensual) non-therapeutic male circumcision with the chair and vice chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva. They went armed with a dossier of evidence showing considerable international opposition on Human Rights, legal and medical grounds

(secularism.org.uk)
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