Why Circumcision Is No Crime

A decade ago, who would have guessed that controversies about male circumcision would roil a number of European countries and achieve some resonance in the United States? But that is what has happened. These events have raised important questions about individual rights, parental authority, religious liberty, and the nature of morality.

The issue of male circumcision reached the front pages of newspapers around the world in June 2012 when a court in Cologne, Germany, ruled that circumcising young boys inflicted grievous bodily harm and that the child’s “fundamental right to bodily integrity” trumped parental rights, despite the fact that the parents were acting in accordance with long-established and fundamental requirements of their religious faith. Although the case that reached the court concerned Muslim parents, its implications for Jews was obvious, and the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany condemned the decision as “an unprecedented and dramatic intrusion on the self-determination of religious communities.” Meeting a month later, Muslim and Jewish leaders issued a joint statement defending circumcision and calling on the German government to take action. Michael Bongardt, a professor of ethics at Berlin’s Free University, contended that “the often very aggressive prejudice against religion as backward, irrational, and opposed to science is increasingly defining popular opinion.” On the other side, a leading criminal-law expert called for a national discussion about “how much religiously motivated violence against children a society is ready to tolerate.” With her country’s troubled past weighing heavily on her, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared, “I do not want Germany to be the only country in the world in which Jews cannot practice their rites.” By December 2012, the Bundestag passed legislation protecting parents’ rights to have young boys circumcised.