“To your tents, O Israel!”
Anybody who’s avoided the impression that we’re reliving the incredibly crappy 1930′s — behold the banning of Judaism in Germany.
History notoriously rhymes with itself, or repeats itself with variations. This time, it’s the German courts instead of the Reich’s “chancellor.” But then, Germany back then justified the killing of those who were ill, or who had mental or physical problems, as being kind and gentle. Now, they claim that they’re banning circumcision for the good of baby boys, because a snip constitutes “grievous bodily harm.”
But it’s the same old thing. Why let people live their lives in freedom when you can use the power of the state to crush them, instead?
The argument is that circumcision should wait until boys can choose for themselves. (Of course, by then, they will have banned adult circumcision as cruel, even though they’re okay with radical genital reconstructions and removals.)
You will notice, of course, that nobody claims that language choice, or the choice of whether to learn math, should wait until children can choose by themselves. People know perfectly well that it is cruel for a parent to withhold the knowledge and practice of language and number.
Sigh. It’s so stupid. Pretty much everybody male in my municipal area got circumcised (in a non-ritual way, as a routine hygiene measure) at the hospital when I was growing up, and had been getting circumcised for a good seventy or eighty years or more. “Grievous bodily harm” doesn’t wash.
Interestingly (by which I mean, “disgustingly”), the court held that circumcision was okay for medical reasons, but not for religious ones. Which makes no sense. If it’s grievous bodily harm to snip for religion, how does it become okay for cleanliness? This strikes me as a case where the court wants to offend the maximum number of Jews (and Muslims, for that matter), while allowing ethnic Germans to continue to snip whatever they want.
UPDATE: The Last Conformer, a blogger from Germany, has additional info on this ruling and what it means. Via Darwin Catholic.
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