San Francisco Can Ban Happy Meal Toys but Not Circumcisions

Even though most of San Francisco treats their private parts like toys, they can't regulate them the way they regulated Happy Meals:

A San Francisco County Superior Court judge ruled Thursday that a measure prohibiting male circumcision should be taken off the November ballot.

Judge Loretta M. Giorgi ordered San Francisco's director of elections to strike the measure from the city's ballot because she said that it is "expressly preempted" by the California Business and Professions Code.

Under that statute, only the state is allowed to regulate medical procedures, and "the evidence presented is overwhelmingly persuasive that circumcision is a widely practiced medical procedure," the ruling said.

After a brief hearing, Giorgi also found that the proposed ban would violate citizens' right to the free exercise of religion, said Deputy City Atty. Mollie Lee, because it targets Muslims and Jews, whose faiths call for circumcising males.

Proponents of the ban, which would have made it a misdemeanor to conduct a circumcision, argued that the procedure is "male genital mutilation." They collected enough signatures to put the ban up for a vote.

But in June, a group of doctors, community groups and Muslim and Jewish families sued to get the measure off the ballot, arguing that it was anti-Semitic and violated state law.

This whole thing would have been struck down eventually because of the constitutional protections on religious expression, so the whole exercise was futile.