Alon Weinberg | University of Manitoba

Foreskin Man Image: Matthew Ness

The ongoing debate over the State’s right to intervene in, regulate, accommodate and block particular religious practices recently came to a head in a San Francisco-based campaign to bring the question of outlawing male circumcision to a referendum.

The campaign, coordinated by a web-based community calling itself the foreskin restoration / intactivist network, succeeded in reaching the required 7,200 signatures necessary to create a ballot initiative to be voted on in San Francisco. The ballot measure was actually written by a non-profit group in San Diego called MGM(male-genital mutilation)bill.org, and led by San Francisco resident Lloyd Schofield, Mother Jones magazine reported, though Schofield himself was inspired by a group he saw marching in the city’s Pride parade called BANG: Bay Area iNtactivist Group. Since 2008 a national group calling itself Intact America has also been working “to protect babies and children from circumcision and all other forms of medically unnecessary genital alteration.” Schofield framed the debate in terms of genital mutilation, arguing that female genital mutilation is illegal while men are denied the same protection guaranteed to them under the 14^th Amendment.

In Canada, the more docile-named Association for Genital Integrity has been gathering information on what the various provincial colleges of physicians and surgeons have been advising their members as well as corresponding with human rights commissions, attorneys, general academics, and more. However, the general lack of direct democracy in Canada—referenda and plebiscites are a very rare occurrence— has prevented this issue from ever making it to a public vote.  Finally, for those beginning to question circumcision, both the Circumcision Resource Center and the Jewish Circumcision Resource Center offer well-researched arguments that cast doubt upon this well-established secular and religious practice.

As if a debate involving religious practices, rights, and cultural relativity isn’t complicated enough, that other endlessly debated force, Science, has affected the conversation on both sides.  For years there have been claims that circumcision helps reduce the risks of acquiring HIV/AIDS and other STIs, especially in Africa where the rates of those infected are higher.  Recently, the World Health Organization listed male circumcision under its Programmes and Projects, stating that circumcision can be used to reduce the risks of HIV/AIDS in Africa, and issuing a manual for infant circumcision.  This controversial position was based primarily on a study led by University of Manitoba researcher Stephen Moses that showed circumcised men to have lower rates of HIV infection. While the scientific argument posits circumcision as a clear cut health choice, Moses’s methodology has been strongly questioned by others in the field, including the Seattle-based group DOC – Doctors Opposing Circumcision.   A longer examination of the science behind circumcision can be found at Mothering.com.

Returning to San Francisco, the petition was first created in November of last year and by spring the coalition had obtained the necessary number of signatures for a November 2011 ballot, but by then the controversy was raging across the internet, throughout Jewish media, and among civil liberty organizations, especially those fighting for constitutionally-protected religious freedom.

Salon.com took a personal and anecdotal approach to the issue, asking men both cut and uncut what they thought of circumcision, concluding that the issue’s touchiness is “a reminder of just how fundamental our sexuality is to our personal identities.” In the Quaker-run Friends’ Seminary student newspaper, Ken Armstrong presented a cogent,  historically-researched argument that laid out the history of circumcision in the United States of America, arguing that it was often forwarded to preserve Victorian sexual values.  He ultimately leaned towards an anti-circumcision position, getting to the crux of the matter, which is a set of conflicting rights: the freedom of religion against an infant’s right to freedom from religion. He asks: “[i]f an infant cannot accept religion, why should the faith of his parents be marked in his flesh?”

The debate about whether ritual circumcision, commonly called a bris, should be continued in the modern period has been going on within the Jewish community for many years. Rabbis Basil Herring and Joel Finkelstein of the Modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America saw the efforts to ban an ancient Jewish religious practice—along with efforts to ban Islamic Sharia law as historically repeated signs of “religious bigotry and cultural intolerance.” Jewish filmmaker Eli Ungar-Sargon, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home and whose first film “Cut” was about circumcision’s Jewish identity context, wrote in The Forward that “a law prohibiting circumcision is just what these (liberal) Jews need to start a serious discussion about the problem of brit milah.”[1]

Author Andrea Askowitz, writing on the Jewcy website three years ago, compared Jewish circumcision to ear piercing and to Chinese food binding, placing the practice in between the two and highlighting the vital question of cultural relativism that is ever-presently lurking behind the circumcision debate: “The similarities I see are cultural. Americans and especially Jewish Americans are caught up in a cultural practice.”  Last year, also in Jewcy, Michael Bahler humorously embodied the ethos of cultural practice, telling the story of all his doubts and how, without the doubts being resolved, he nonetheless had his son ritually circumcised. In an effort to interrupt the polarity and find a third, ritually Jewish answer to this highly charged debate, author Jay Michaelson suggested a partial circumcision to satisfy the need for ritual without undue trauma to the body.

Foreskin Man, a cartoon accused of bearing Antisemitic imagery and tone, emerged with a strong anti-circumcision position, prompting some to decry the effort to ban circumcision itself as tainted with Antisemitism. The issue in general touched a nerve in the Jewish community and was closely followed in Israel by various media. And, as with many controversies in the US celebrities have offered their commentaries as well, in this case Russell Crowe chiming in with an anti-circ. position.

By spring 2011, the long-debated virtues and vices of circumcision as a practice gave way to arguments over the constitutional legality of the San Francisco ballot measure, with both popular commentators and legal scholars suggesting that the ballot motion would not withstand a court challenge. The editorial position taken in SF by one major paper was opposed to the ballot initiative, describing the ballot measure as wacky.  Legal debates and specific circumcision cases have existed previously, and a court ruling in British Colombia a few years ago forced the government to pay for an Aboriginal survivor of church-run, state-funded Indian Residential Schools to have his forcible circumcision at age 8 reversed.

Before the ballot initiative could reach the voters in the fall, individual Muslim voices began to join the dominant institutional Jewish position against the measure, and as expected, a court challenge was launched by the anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco, along with numerous Jewish and Muslim individuals, who gathered at City Hall to defend their rights.  The ad hoc Committee for Parental Choice and Religious Freedom was established.

The City of San Francisco’s attorney’s office presented a brief to the court, calling for the ballot measure to be revoked, seeing the initiative as applying only to and thus denying minority rights to freedom of religion. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California filed support for the lawsuit trying to remove the ballot initiative, along lines similar to the opinion of the attorney’s office.  Another effort to block the ban came in the form of a ‘gut and amend’ bill (cue-jumping to prioritize emergent issues by changing the content of a legislative bill near the front of the line) in the California state legislature.

The California court, as predicted by legal experts, finally removed the ballot measure in a ruling this past week, prompting, of course, further response from the blogosphere. For those disappointed that San Franciscans will not get to vote to ban circumcision this fall, and those future babies to be circumcised without respect for their “human dignity,” there is always the Restoring Foreskin online community to join. For now the religious freedom to lop off one’s male infant’s foreskin—ritually or medically—remains intact.

Alon Weinberg is a Master’s student in Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is active in Winnipeg’s indigenous peoples solidarity movement / Friends of Grassy Narrows, working to support indigenous land and rights-based activism against the state and against corporate exploitation of traditional native lands. When he is not working more directly on building the environmental justice movement, he ducks in and out of Green politics, and has worked as an environmental educator from a faith-based perspective. He enjoys the strange mix of anarchists, Marxists, Greens, and faith-based activists that makes up his diverse Winnipeg community.