Female genital mutilation case in Detroit: Is it a right or a crime? Lawyers plan to claim genital cutting is allowed as a religious right. But legal experts say the First Amendment doesn't bend that far.

The Detroit Free Press reports:

On paper, the law seems clear: Cutting any part of a young girl's genitalia is illegal — and no custom or ritual can be used to justify it.

The law has been on the books for 21 years, unchallenged.

But in a federal courtroom in Detroit, a landmark case involving the centuries-old taboo ritual is about to put that law to the test for the first time.

And perhaps more historic, a question will be raised in the American legal system that has never been raised before: Does the U.S. Constitution allow for genital cutting, even if it's just a minor nick or scraping, in the name of religion?



Defense lawyers plan to argue that religious freedom is at the core of the case in which two physicians and one of their wives are charged with subjecting young girls to genital cutting. All three are members of the Dawoodi Bohra, a small Indian-Muslim sect that has a mosque in Farmington Hills.

The defense maintains that the doctors weren't engaged in any actual cutting — just a scraping of the genitalia — and that the three defendants are being persecuted for practicing their religion by a culture and society that doesn't understand their beliefs and is misinterpreting what they did.

Mulitculturalism does mean: a war on women. Just a reminder.