Iceland is poised to become the first European country to outlaw male circumcision amid signs that the ritual common to both Judaism and Islam may be a new battleground over religious freedom.
Listen, I get the concerns about safety, pain, and sexual sensitivity later in life. Ideally, religious communities would have this conversation and decide to delay circumcision until a later age, the way some Christian denominations delay baptism to an age when the recipient understands what it means. But what really steams me is:
- the comparison to female genital mutilation with the appalling term “male genital mutilation.” The severity is not remotely comparable, and perhaps more importantly, the intention behind the practices are miles apart. Male circumcision is a mark of community membership, probably arose as a way to slow the spread of venereal disease, and is in no way intended to deprive men of sexual pleasure, even if (as a matter of fact) it does. Female genital mutilation is intended to control female sexuality by making sex painful.
- the way opposition to circumcision on the American Left acts as a proxy for Left antisemitism. I wonder sometimes if those people even know that Muslims also circumcise, or if they think it’s just Jews; after all, they wouldn’t want to be accused of Islamophobia, but we all know that there’s no such thing as antisemitism anymore, right?
- and now the way the issue is no doubt acting as a proxy for Islamophobia and antisemitism in Europe.
I was surprised to see being against circumcision as being linked to antisemitism. I’m more familiar with all the Christians who do it though from this I take it circumcision is more important to the Jewish and Muslim faiths.
Um, yeah. For Jews it symbolizes the covenant God made with Abraham; God commands Abraham to circumcise himself and his male descendants. I assume the significance is similar for Muslims, who regard themselves as descendants of Abraham’s first son Ishmael.
For most of recent European history, being uncircumcised was one of the ways Christian men distinguished themselves from the two most salient groups of outsiders: the Jews (the inside outsiders) and “the Turks” (the outside outsiders). Some Protestants started borrowing the practice for some reason, but not until pretty late, and only in the U.S., I think. For most Christians (especially Catholics), the commandment to circumcise, like most of the commandments in the Five Books of Moses, was overridden by the “new covenant” formed through Jesus’s self-sacrifice.
Iceland law to outlaw male circumcision sparks row over religious freedom
Loki is the Philosopher King 