Circumcision bans now target Muslims under a child-rights frame that once targeted Jews

Evidence

In a sense, this is the beginning of a more systematic attack on religious practices that are now defined as Islamic and are seen as inherently violating human rights: the rights of the child to bodily integrity, not the rights of the parents to religious freedom. In November 2013, Anne Lindboe, Norway’s Children’s Ombudsmen, announced that the Norwegian government was going to introduce a law banning ritual male circumcision of pre-teen boys: ‘With good information about risk, pain and lack of health benefits of the intervention, I think parents from minorities would voluntarily abstain from circumcising children.’ She had earlier suggested that Jews and Muslims replace circumcision with ‘a symbolic ritual’. She stated that infant male circumcision was a form of violence against children and should be punished as such. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 920

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the shift from religious-freedom to bodily-autonomy framing of ritual practices, mirroring how sumptuary and dress-code moral panics in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ recast cultural practice as moral violation.
• DEFINE: Shows the human-rights frame being deployed as a new secular vocabulary for policing minority religious practice.