Religious Defense Planned in Landmark Detroit Female Genital Mutilation Case

From the Detroit Free Press:

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. 

First Amendment scholars across the country — liberal and conservative alike — are closely following the case, noting that the fate of the accused will largely rest with scientific evidence. 

The key question for jurors to answer will be: Were children harmed physically? 

If they were, experts say, the religious freedom defense doesn't stand a chance. But if the defense can show that it was just a nick and caused no harm, some experts believe, the defendants could be acquitted on religious grounds.