The Bigotry of the Anti-Circumcision Zealots
The international campaign demonising the religious practice of circumcising young boys is fuelled by a new form of misanthropic bigotry. It represents a synthesis of twenty-first-century cultural correctness and old-fashioned prejudice. This moral crusade brings together many of the worst trends of our age: the paranoid dogma about the ‘vulnerable child’; the culturally sanctioned contempt for the exercise of parental authority; intolerance of freedom of religion; insensitivity to people’s traditional beliefs; and old-fashioned prejudice against circumcised people.
Last week’s verdict in a court in Cologne, Germany, which said that the religious circumcision of young boys should be banned, is part of a wider international campaign. For example, circumcision has been a big issue in Norway for some time: last month, the Centre Party there said it would seek to outlaw the practice. ‘Circumcision on religious grounds should be a criminal offence’, said party spokesperson Jenny Klinge. Last year, there was controversy in San Francisco, where campaigners also tried to have circumcision banned.
One of the most chilling things about the attempt to criminalise circumcision is its arrogant and paternalistic undertones. Last week’s German court verdict was bad enough, with its calling into question of the right of parents to bring up their children in accordance with their faith. However, what was even worse was the way that this act of bigoted intolerance was presented to the world. Take Holm Putzke, law professor at Passau University in southern Germany, whose arguments were used by the court in Cologne to justify its verdict. Putzke says he doesn’t know what all the fuss is about, since ‘nobody wants to ban religious circumcision in Islam and Judaism, not at all’ - no, all that he and the court is saying is that circumcision ‘should just be decided by those who undergo it’. Considering that in Jewish custom a boy has to be circumcised on the eighth day after birth, what Putzke is actually saying is that so long as you Jews change your law and adopt my timetable for when males should be circumcised, you can keep your ‘religious’ customs.