For centuries, circumcision kept Jews apart from members of other faiths. Jews practiced it as a core religious obligation, but outside of Muslim countries, no one else around them did. More recently, circumcision is emerging as a force to accomplish the opposite. Efforts in San Francisco and Santa Monica to criminalize the circumcision of minors will bring Jews and non-Jews closer together, because the target is not Jews, but religious belief itself.

The almost identical ballot initiatives are badly flawed. They may even be unconstitutional in unduly restricting the religious liberties of Jews and Muslims, both of whom see circumcision as important to their faiths. The measures take decision-making away from parents, who have always had to determine what is best for their children in innumerable ways. They replace parental prerogative with the authoritarian will of society. Parents may think they know what is best for their children, but segments of society knows better, and they are intent on prevailing.

What parental decisions they will seek to criminalize next? Is circumcision the only parental practice that could be objected to as somehow injurious to the well-being of a child? Whatever unwanted consequences result from circumcision, they cannot hold a candle to obesity. Will parents soon be prosecuted for allowing their children to eat snack food rather than broccoli? Will we incarcerate parents who do not make their children exercise sufficiently, and allow them too many hours in front of a computer screen? Should we jail citizens of Santa Monica for failing to move their children to Montana, where children are less likely to be affected by street crime or traffic accidents?

If circumcision was uniformly accepted by medical science as a hazard to minors, there might be room to argue for banning it. Society recognizes its obligation to protect children from parental decisions that are undeniably dangerous, when they offer no value other than the fulfillment of a religious precept. Thus, female genital mutilation is illegal in the United States. It carries great medical risks, and provides no advantages other than a religious one to a small percentage of Muslims.

That is hardly the case in regard to male circumcision. Supporters of the ban do not argue that circumcision should be banned because it is dangerous, because it isn't. (Seventy percent of males in the United States are circumcised.) They argue that it denies the child a measure of sexual pleasure when he grows up—an argument that is disputed by others.

Any purported cost has to be evaluated against the benefit to the child, and the benefits are considerable, at least in the minds of a significant part of the medical population. The World Health Organization (2007) describes the efficacy of circumcision as "proven beyond reasonable doubt." It is linked to a lower incidence of penile cancer and STDs, and offers considerable protection against HIV. (Adult men in AIDS-ravaged Africa have been known to trek for four days to be circumcised in a distant clinic.) The best case that can be made for supporters of the ban is disputed in every argument; it does not remotely resemble the case against behaviors that are banned.