By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Eight demonstrators opposed to infant circumcision protested in downtown Princeton on Yom Kippur Wednesday wearing mock blood-stained white paints in a move to end what they said is a medically unnecessary surgery.
The California-based group Bloodstained Men was in town as part of a 14-day tour through the East Coast that will include stops through New Jersey, New York New England and Pennsylvania. Brother K, the founder of the group who uses that as his legal name, said the practice violates human rights and is hurtful and traumatic to infant boys.
He said his group’s emphasis is on medical circumcision in terms of what doctors are doing in hospitals, although the group also opposes circumcision for religious reasons, too. Demonstrators stood on Nassau Street by the entrance to Princeton University with signs containing messages that read “I did not consent,” “His body his choice” and “Stop torturing boys.”
Lauren Meyer, of Point Pleasant, the only woman protestor, said she regretted having her oldest son circumcised. She said the boy later developed a medical complication from the surgery, one that she did not have performed on her second son.
“This is a human rights issue,” she said.
Bloodstained Men member Harry Guiremand, of Hawaii, said the protest was not scheduled to deliberately fall on Yom Kippur, noting instead that the group had its own schedule to adhere to.
Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, in a religion where infant circumcision is a Biblical mandate. In the book of Genesis, the patriarch Abraham is told by God that boys have to circumcised when they are 8 days old.
Some Jews leaving services at Richardson Auditorium on the Princeton campus were observed walking by the demonstrators without exchanging words.
Protestors wore white pants with red paint in the groin area representing the wounds that circumcised men have suffered. In his case, Brother K said he was circumcised as a child and that he subsequently changed his given name because of the surgery, what he called “a mark of superstition” on his body.
