
Advertisement
View the most popular tags overall?
Believe it or not, an American city, San Francisco, is voting to proscribe one of the central rituals of an entire religious community, the Jewish people, who have been circumcising male infants since the time of Abraham.
The Jewish-led coalition working to defeat a San Francisco ballot measure that would ban circumcision there filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning.
The attempt to make circumcision illegal, including those performed for religious reasons, is spreading beyond San Francisco, which aimed last week to become the first American municipality to ban the practice. Now, residents of Santa Monica have filed a petition indicating that they, too, intend to get a similar measure on the November ballot for their city. While these are the two most aggressive attempts to curtail the practice of circumcision, they represent an increasing trend away from the practice, or at least away from the presumption of its necessity.