Just an additional point:

On 7 May 2012, the District Court of Cologne, Germany (criminal division, case no. 151 Ns 169/11), acquitted a medical doctor for having performed a circumcision on a Muslim boy. However, the court did so only because it acknowledged a relevant judgmental error on the punitive nature of the act (the doctor didn't know and couldn't have known that what he was doing amounted to a crime) and not because the act could not be qualified as a crime (inflicting bodily harm). The court did not accept religious freedom (as underlying the consent of the parents to the procedure) as a relevant justification for the act because one could have waited until the child himself could validly consent to the procedure for religious reasons.

Not surprisingly the opposition did not take long to respond, with Muslim and Jewish organizations and individuals acting in concert and many others joining in. Indeed a difficult question. Cutting off others' body parts without consent for no compelling reason is something that is usually not condoned. Can - or even must - that assessment change when the same body part has been cut off routinely for hundreds of years or even longer and when many victims - presumably - would not only not mind but request the procedure for cultural, religious or social reasons? Does it matter whether the body part is vital (an organ or part of an organ, or blood as in blood transfusion or in some other way equally significant such as in female genital mutilation) or completely irrelevant (as in this case)? Does it matter, as the Court argued, that one could easily wait until such time when the "victim" can consent? Would such consent be valid? - Thus twisted the relevance of the mutilated part would surely play a role in many jurisdictions. What role does acceptance play in this context? Acceptance is a form of majority rule. Yet again, obviously we sometimes and rightly so condemn what is happening under this guise (e.g. racism, holocaust, apartheid) regardless of how uniformly accepted the practice may have been in a given jurisdiction and in other cases we accept it despite rather egregious results. Guns (no, people) kill thousands in the US and elsewhere just in related accidents and errors and cars (no, drivers) have killed millions around the world who could be alive if we restricted transport to buses and railways and the like. Is it that we weigh the perceived or real benefit of driving cars and owning guns against the cost? Is the perceived benefit of allowing the cutting off of body parts for religious reasons the social peace or some form of social justice we want to preserve? But if that is so, are we not again merely talking about acceptance and hence caught in a vicious circle?