Anti-Circ Circus Moves to Santa Monica
Performing a circumcision on a boy under age 18 — even for religious reasons — would be illegal under a measure that a San Diego group hopes to place on Santa Monica’s November 2012 ballot.
A similar initiative this month from the anti-circumcision group known as MGM Bill garnered enough signatures in San Francisco to place it on that city’s November ballot. MGM stands for “male genital mutilation.”
Matthew Hess, the group’s founder and president, said that California law prohibits female genital mutilation and that boys should get the same protection. Circumcision, he said, removes “thousands of nerve endings” and is a painful and unnecessary procedure. He equated it to the practice in some countries of removing all or part of a female’s genitals.
Circumcision of male infants is a religious requirement in Judaism and a cleanliness-related custom in many Islamic communities. As a result, the effort by MGM Bill to put forth the initiative is raising concern among religious organizations, which contend that a ban would violate the 1st Amendment prohibition against government interference with a person’s practice of religion.