There has been a kerfuffle over a German court ruling that a boy’s right to choose whether he spends his adult life with an intact penis supersedes the religious freedom of the parent, and thus that circumcision amounts to illegal “bodily harm”.
“The body of the child is irreparably and permanently changed by a circumcision” said the court. “This change contravenes the interests of the child to decide later on his religious beliefs”. Further, the “fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents” and “The religious freedom of the parents and their right to educate their child would not be unacceptably compromised if they were obliged to wait until the child could himself decide to be circumcised”.
Predictably, religious groups — Muslim, Jewish and Christian — have been in uproar, claiming that that this ruling violates their “religious freedom”, a supposed right to impose their religion on their children. Notably, they make no mention of the religious rights of the child. Likely they consider that the child has no such rights — or at least, has only the “right” to have his parents’ choice of religion imposed on him. After all, in the United Kingdom, children at state schools are legally compelled to worship the Christian god, and have no right to opt out. When opposing the repeal of this compulsory religious worship in a House of Lords debate Baroness Trumpington said that it “did not matter if pupils were bored, did not like going to chapel or were not interested in religious matters”. So much for religious freedom.
In Islamic countries things are worse: a boy brought up by Muslim parents has no freedom to choose his religion, but must follow Islam, else he is an “apostate” for which “crime” the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence prescribe the death sentence; and this is not merely theoretical.
Religious parents have traditionally held it to be their duty to ensure that the child is “brought up” in their choice of religion, with the child being given little say in the matter. So ingrained is this attitude that society often labels the child with the religion of its parents, long before the child is of an age to think for his or her self and either consent or dissent.
This is strange, since the “free will” right of adults to decide for themselves is usually held to be of such vital importance that God chooses to allow all manner of evil rather than impinge on that freedom. The parent will point to the child’s lack of knowledge and understanding as justifying giving the child no choice, yet presumably that gap in understanding is miniscule compared to that between the parent and the parent’s god. God is held to value free will so highly that he refuses to impose, even across that chasm, and yet parents consider themselves justified in imposing across a gap that is comparatively only a hair’s breadth.
To some extent we should and do accept the parents’ right to impose their religious beliefs and practices on their child. In the same way we accept a parent’s right to take their child to Manchester United football games, or to Greenpeace demonstrations, and we would accept a parents’ right to involve their child in Labour Party politics. Thus we accept parents taking their child to church or to a Bible study.
Yet we increasingly recognize limits to parental rights. Despite the Biblical admonition that “He that spareth his rod hateth his son” and the instruction “Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell”, beating children is now prohibited or highly restricted in many Western countries. And Richard Dawkins has argued that to scare children with traditional notions of hell, in such a way that they actually believe it, amounts to child abuse. This is sometimes misreported as Dawkins saying that any and all religious education is “child abuse” (misrepresentations of Dawkins being a common means of avoiding dealing with what he actually says).
Dawkins has a good point. Surely threats of punishment to children should be child-sized and proportionate to their misdeeds? Our society regards children as not capable of acts bad enough for them to deserve being put into jail, and yet some religions regard children as quite capable of enough sinfulness that they should justly suffer the agony of having their skin burned, continually and all over their body, for ever and ever and ever. Is that a fair thing to threaten any child with, even if they are guilty of taking a cookie when they shouldn’t, answering back, or not keeping their room tidy?
If one made a movie filled with tortures envisaged for hell it would be age-18 rated and considered totally unsuitable for children. But when done for religious purposes things are different. Even parents of moderate Christian religions will readily give their children books of Bible stories — stories of Moses and Joshua, full of mass killing, slaughter and rape.
As reported in Numbers (and children’s books):
Moses sent them into battle, a thousand from each tribe … They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man.
Then Moses commanded:
“Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
The book of Joshua is a tale of extermination and ethnic cleansing on an epic scale:
They devoted the city [of Jericho] to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it — men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.
Then the Lord said to Joshua “Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai. … You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves. When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. Twelve thousand men and women fell that day, all the people of Ai.
[Later] Joshua took Makkedah. He put the city and its king to the sword and totally destroyed everyone in it. He left no survivors.
Then Joshua and all Israel with him moved on from Makkedah to Libnah and attacked it. The Lord also gave that city and its king into Israel’s hand. The city and everyone in it Joshua put to the sword. He left no survivors there.
Then Joshua and all Israel with him moved on from Libnah to Lachish; he took up positions against it and attacked it The city and everyone in it he put to the sword, just as he had done to Libnah.
Then Joshua and all Israel with him moved on from Lachish to Eglon; they took up positions against it and attacked it. They captured it that same day and put it to the sword and totally destroyed everyone in it
Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron and attacked it. They took the city and put it to the sword, together with its king, its villages and everyone in it. They left no survivors. Just as at Eglon, they totally destroyed it and everyone in it.
Then Joshua and all Israel with him turned around and attacked Debir. They took the city, its king and its villages, and put them to the sword. Everyone in it they totally destroyed. They left no survivors.
So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.
Children’s fairy tales have always contained a lot of darkness, but in the fairy tales the baddies usually get their comeuppance. In the children’s Bible story books the likes of the mass-murdering Moses and Joshua are held up as the good guys — simply because they believed that they had their god’s blessing to exterminate, the same god whose instructions the parents want the child to follow.
If parents were to give their children story books lauding people who, on God’s command, flew airplanes into skyscrapers, killing thousands, and if the suicide bombers were presented as the good guys, on “our side”, faithfully following god’s will against the infidels and non-believers, then such parents would be considered extremists and a danger to society. Yet this sort of story from the Old Testament can be found in any number of books given to children by parents who consider themselves benign and moderate; the stories might be from long ago, but the central message is the same: those who believe in our god are the good guys, and those who don’t are the bad guys, rightly deserving of condemnation and death.
We need to accept parents’ rights to inculcate their religion in their children. But the children have rights also, a right to a broad education, a right to explore the world beyond their parents’ opinions and to be educated (“led out”) to think for themselves. Thus schooling should not be about reinforcing the prejudices of the parents, but about exposing the children to different ways of thinking.
It is precisely those children who are from a religious home who would benefit most from hearing other points of view, hearing from people who disagree with their parents. And surely they have that right, as fully human individuals and as future citizens. Those who see a school’s job as narrowly reinforcing the parents’ prejudices, and as keeping the children in ignorance of any alternative, do not merit the noble label “teacher”, but are instead trying to indoctrinate.
So why do some religious parents want to cut off parts of their newborn child? For Jews this relates back to the instruction in Genesis:
Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you.”
The Old Testament also says (Deuteronomy 21):
If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. …” Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death.
No-one nowadays would argue for the “religious freedom” to carry out this instruction. We all accept that it is superseded by the greater morality of today’s world, compared to when the Bible was written, and even the religious accept laws prohibiting such acts. Thus we cannot accept a mere Biblical instruction as superseding morality, or as superseding the rights of the child.
Is circumcision just an identity badge, an indelible mark branding the child as the property of his parents’ religion, as a farmer might indicate ownership by branding his cattle? The great Jewish Rabbi and teacher Moses Maimonides told us that the main point of the Jewish commandment was to reduce sexual pleasure:
Similarly with regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question … The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision. None of the activities necessary for the preservation of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that goes beyond what is needed are diminished. The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable.
Similarly, the spread of routine circumcision in then-Christian English-speaking nations resulted from Victorian prudery about sex and a desire to stop teenage boys from masturbating. The foreskin is among the most sensitive parts of the penis, and removing it changes the sexual experience. One can doubt whether circumcision actually does reduce masturbation, but the historical record shows that that was the intent, leading to campaigns promoting circumcision for reasons of “hygiene”. That euphemism has left a legacy even today, with some people thinking that there is something “unhygienic” about an uncircumcised penis; there isn’t.
Given the usual religious hangups about sex one can suspect that circumcision among Muslims had similar origins. Certainly FGM is prevalent in some Muslim societies, being promoted by many Imams, and FGM certainly is an attempt to reduce sexual pleasure, again under the euphemism that the intact woman is “unclean”.
In today’s West other reasons are usually given for circumcising boys: “tradition” and “hygiene” are just hangovers from Victorian prudery. It is also suggested that the reduction in sensation resulting from removing the highly sensitive foreskin lengthens the sexual act, to the benefit of the female. This might well be true, but shouldn’t that option be something one decides for oneself, rather than being imposed on an infant? Googling shows that many adult men resent having been circumcised, even disregarding those who are suffering long-lasting medical complications from the procedure.
Another claim is that circumcision reduces the risk of transmission of HIV, and the WHO currently recommends circumcision in HIV-prevalent areas. There may indeed be some benefit, but it is slight (far less effective than condom use), and while it might reduce female-to-male transmission it might increase male-to-female transmission. The benefits of circumcision for reasons of HIV are disputed and the WHO’s advice is controversial.
In any case, unless the medical benefits of circumcision were overwhelming and compelling (which they aren’t, medical authorities in the Western world do not recommend routine circumcision of infants, and most recommend against it), it seems to me that the overriding consideration is one of choice.
The child should surely be allowed to make up his own mind, at an appropriate age, about whether to spend his adult life circumcised (whether that is to identify with a religion or for other reasons), and the parents have no legitimate reason to usurp that choice.
Does being a parent confer a right to stamp on the child a religious identity badge, regardless of any future opinions that child might hold? Those who regard the child as the property of the parents or of the parents’ religion will answer “yes”. Those who, instead, regard the parents as custodians of the child, and as charged with nurturing that child towards an adulthood in which he (as far as practical) has all his options open, will answer “no”. And a simple appeal to “religious freedom” will not support a “yes” unless one maintains that one set of humans (parents) have human rights and religious freedom while another set (children) do not.
We accept the right of parents to involve their children in a church or in Greenpeace activism or in being a fan of Manchester United, noting that the child could, approaching adulthood, become an atheist or a fan of Manchester City. Those who support the right of parents to go further and impose circumcision as an indelible religious identity badge should, if they were consistent, also support the right of the parent to tattoo his infant’s shoulder with “I love Man Utd” (which would be illegal in the UK).
Circumcision supporters usually squirm at that comparison, preferring to regard religious parents as having far greater rights to impose than non-religious parents. Well, they don’t. Because the child, the future adult, also has rights. And the “I love Man Utd” tattoo imposed on an infant is wrong precisely because it removes the right of the future adult to choose. And religious-identity-badge circumcision is wrong for the same reason. Just ask yourself whose body is being considered. And prohibiting non-medical circumcision is not a violation of religious freedom, it is a defense of religious freedom, a defense on behalf of those who can’t speak up for themselves and so most need legal protection.
Update: “Following the death of a baby in Manchester after a home circumcision … nurse Grace Adeleye … was found guilty of the manslaughter of Goodluck by gross negligence … up to three children a month are admitted to the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital because of bleeding after home-based circumcisions …”.
coelsblog 
Reblogged this on Dublin City University Secular Society and commented:
Very impressed with this article.
Christians have the right, the duty, and the obligation to teach their children Christian beliefs. However, children cannot be forced to believe in Christ, many children of religious parents do not believe in Christ. But to say that parents do not have the right to instruct children with what they believe is right and wrong is completely ridiculous. I do not know of one single Christian who would disagree that atheist parents have the right to teach their children what they believe.
If parents want to circumcise their male infants that is their business, not yours or the states. This is very different from female circumcision which is horrible and disgusting and should be banned by law and enforced with penalties. What’s the difference? Male circumcision is mandated by the Jewish religion, female circumcision is not, and religious freedom is vital to a free society. male circumcision does not in any way impair the male’s sexual function later in life, female circumcision does. Male circumcision is swift, female circumcision can be horrible and agonizing.
It is really too bad that if a woman wants to have her unborn child ripped into pieces and thrown in the garbage people don’t care, but if someone wants to inflict a swift and quickly forgotten operation on a boy then they pretend to be greatly concerned. This is not concern for people at all, it is hostility to religion.
About the Old Testament massacres, not a single Christian parent or Jewish parent teaches their children to go out and massacre people. The RAF in WWII in one or two bombing raids probably killed more people than were killed in the entire conquest of Canaan, I doubt that concerns you very much. Can parents teach their children governments have a right to go to war to destroy enemies like Nazi Germany? So they teach their children it is all right to firebomb cities and wipe out the entire population indiscriminately – or should this be forbidden?
It is not your business or the states if people teach their children religious beliefs. In Stalin’s Russia children were taken away from their religious parents. Atheists have done it before, would they like to do it again? And maybe the religious parents should be sent to labor camps and churches should be physically destroyed because the all-knowing atheists have decided what’s best for society?
No-one is suggesting that parents have no right to teach their children their views. But do the children also have a right to hear other and differing opinions? Or do parents have the right to try to ensure that the child hears no opinion but their own? I’d say the former, because children are people also.
I don’t accept that. Children are people in their own right and deserve the state’s protection. Would you argue that parents also have the right to keep their children uneducated, or beat them excessively, or send them out to work at age 7, or withhold necessary medical treatment?
Circumcision is irreversible, and thus the child should have a say in whether he spends his adult life circumcised, and that means the state should protect the child where the parents refuse to recognise that right.
I’ve added numbers to your three reasons. (1) Does this mean that if a religion *did* mandate female circumcision then you’d accept it on “religious freedom” grounds? (2) Male sexual function is altered by circumcision, that much is undeniable, and much of the *intent* behind circumcision is indeed to “impair” that function (see quotes in the article); many people consider that function is indeed impaired . (3) Would you, then, accept female circumcision if it were carried our by hospitals under anaesthetic? If not then your argument is a red-herring.
That’s a bit of a strawman, especially in reply to an article that is all about supporting religious freedom and religious equality! Yes, children are people, and so have rights; they are not just the property of their parents’ religion.
Pretty strange overreaction here. Try to separate the legitimate question of protecting children from the issue of religious freedom. What makes you think that anyone wants to take children away from religious parents, send them to labor camps and destroy churches?
I am not an atheist but it does stick in my craw that many people assume that all atheists want to destroy religion. Yes there are some like that, but I think most support religious freedom for everyone. Or put in a broader perspective, they support people who believe AND and those who choose NOT TO BELIEVE.
The example of Stalin is that of a dictator abusing his power. We have had many more RELIGIOUS dictators in the world’s history, including Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Why? Because religion is a good way to unite people to attack others (by painting others as God’s enemy) and serves the dictator’s purpose of gaining and consolidating his power. On the other hand, a dictator like Stalin probably saw relgious beliefs as a threat to his power. I think that most reasonable people would see both approaches as being wrong.
There is nothing inherently evil about atheists’ personal beliefs any more than there is about any person’s belief system. But in a civilized society WE DO have the right to make laws to protect the wellbeing of its members, particularly when it comes to those who have no say in the matter. I don’t see that as religious persecution any more than laws to prohibit parents from beating their kids (although some people claim religious persecution for that too.)
As far as what the Bible teaches as thinking people I have to wonder why we condemn the muslims for practicing the same kind of barbaric laws and customs that are contained in our own Bible? We call them barbaric and there is a reason why, we outgrew most of that brutality long ago. Christians are all in a panic about preserving “traditional values”, well if you want to be technical about it then that ought to include making a woman marry her rapist (just as they do in Muslim countries) and stoning anyone who doesn’t agree with your religion.
In light of the fact that atrocities have been commited under the guise of “relgious freedom” then why should religion be exempt from the laws that secular people have to follow? Laws to protect the rights of the innocent do not impinge on anyone’s right to believe in God.
Pingback: Britain’s 10 worst violations of religious equality | coelsblog
Fascinating post. Thank you for posting.
However.. this line is at the heart of the post “I don’t accept that. Children are people in their own right and deserve the state’s protection. ” I accept that children are people in their own right, but at what point in their development do they become people? At birth? at conception? at 24 weeks? If the government over-rides the right of the parents then surely the parents have no choice for termination?
State protection cannot be carried out without the state taking parental responsibilities over the child, and in that case we might aswell look at China and see what the future might hold.
The government does not have the right to control how to raise a child and certainly does not have the right to say which culture over-rides which because at the end ‘circumcision’ is a tribal identity. You may not like it, I don’t, but neither you nor the state have the right to decide which tribal identity the child might have.
There must be a happy median where the child’s best interests are recognized as belonging with it’s parents. and within their identity.
Sadly, I can’t stop thinking that this sort of posts don’t have the child’s best interest in mind as much as the rights of the “secularists” in mind.
Hi Daniel,
I’d say that they are not “people” at conception but are people at birth. The transition in between is not a sudden one at a definite time, since as with many things in biology the change from a fertilized egg to a person is a process of gradual development. Of course legally one has to apply somewhat-arbitrary cut-off times.
There are many points on the continuum between “parents can do whatever they like, including kill their child”, and “a totalitarian state micro-manages everything”. We all accept the parents having a lot of lee-way, but the state setting limits and protecting the child.
Most of us would say that the government does have such rights, for example most accept that the state can require that the child receive sufficient food and an education and medical care (while allowing a lot of latitude about how that occurs).
I don’t agree. The state already outlaws some “tribal identity” badges. FGM is an example. It would also be illegal in the UK to tattoo a child with a “tribal identity” badge, or to cut off a little finger as a “tribal identity” badge. I don’t accept that saying “tribal identity” gives the parents the right to usurp choices that the child might want to make for himself or herself when older.
I don’t see why that follows. Of course in most cases a child will inevitably exist within the parents’ tribal identity, but the child will grow up and then has the right to choose for him or herself. The child can choose to follow a different religion than the parents, or vote a different way, or follow a different football team.
The parents should not put unnecessary and indelible identity stamps on to the child. It would be illegal for parents to tattoo a child’s arm with “I love Manchester United”, and it should similarly be illegal to cut off healthy parts of the child’s body for “tribal identity” reasons.
Reblogged this on oogenhand and commented:
“And Richard Dawkins has argued that to scare children with traditional notions of hell, in such a way that they actually believe it, amounts to child abuse.”
However, there is no way human reason can disprove the existence of eternal hell. So the Wager of Pascal can only be countered by the Wager of Bernstein. That is, the likelihood of the existence of God is far greater than the likelihood of the truth of the more common religions.
As regards circumcision, the religious will counter this by pointing to abortion, which can only be countered by pointing out that if abortion is murder, the Holocaust is inconsequential; six million in the death camps v.s. fifty million EACH YEAR in the abortion clinics.
Hell is eternal…
Also, many women say they prefer circumcised men because they last longer, that is, these women appreciate the fact that these men are less able to enjoy sex. So it could be argued that circumcision is a kind of surgical affirmative action. The West often treat men and women differently if this is in favor of women.
It is also contradictory to claim that circumcision is unacceptable mutilation and then turn around and whine and bitch that these circumcised men have sexual relations with women from the uncircumcised ethnic-religious group. Either these men have too much sexual pleasure, or too little.
I saw a really interesting video about the legal issues that arise from religious freedom impacting child safety https://www.talksonlaw.com/talks/when-religious-freedom-harms-children