Body Modification Rites: A Series of Tweets

This is cheap kind of post without much content, just a series of questions I posed earlier on Twitter. Sorry! I’m posting them here to preserve the questions for myself and for anyone who might want to engage them. These questions relate to body modification rites and the freedom of religious expression (in Europe particularly). They arose as a result of  a court ruling in Cologne, Germany that banned the religious circumcision of infants in that city, but even more specifically as a result of reading a Washington Post op-ed piece about this ban: “The crime of circumcision,” by Michael Gerson. I found it interesting that even though the family at the heart of the case was Muslim Mr. Gerson’s op-ed was almost entirely about Jewish circumcision. That fact made me wonder about how religious immigration and the privileges of established tradition factor into questions like these…among other things.

https://twitter.com/PerDSmith/status/221257698463858688 https://twitter.com/PerDSmith/status/221258714848571398 https://twitter.com/PerDSmith/status/221306354663563266 https://twitter.com/PerDSmith/status/221307099135750147 https://twitter.com/PerDSmith/status/221308523143905280 https://twitter.com/PerDSmith/status/221309433123311617 https://twitter.com/PerDSmith/status/221310481615433728 https://twitter.com/PerDSmith/status/221311008617148416

I should note that I did also read a couple of other pieces on this issue before today, and one that was particularly interesting was written by Connor Wood over at Science on Religion: “Circumcision in religion: What does science say?” There are some issues I would take with how this “scientific” perspective can and should be applied in a Western secular nation state, but I’ll save those for a later date.

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