Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats have succeeded in passing a bill that protects the right to perform ritual circumcisions . Yet it was not a unanimous victory: 434 of the Bundestag’s members voted in favor, one-hundred against, with forty-six abstaining. The opponents—-members of the Left Party, Social Democrats, and Greens—-had put forward an alternate bill that would have made male circumcisions illegal until age fourteen.
