Limits on what can be done to your tongue?
Is your body your own?
More specifically, is your tongue your own?
What can you do with your tongue? Can you stick it out at people? Lick ice cream cones? Kiss your significant other, say hello to your grandma? Can you tattoo it, or shove a piece of metal through it?
What about cutting it, so it looks like a snake’s tongue?
If a certain St. Clair Shores Democrat has his way, your tongue may no longer be your own.
William Callahan proposed an amendment to the public health code that prohibits any person from splitting another person’s tongue. It passed the House, and is on hold while the Senate is out of session for the summer.
Tongue splitting procedures can be done by a doctor, usually specializing in plastic surgery, with a scalpel. It can be done by a piercer. Some people also split their own tongues, by tying a string around a piercing and pulling it through.
Why people want to do this is irrelevant. Why they can’t is the issue; why people are permitted to get liposuction and face lifts but can’t have this particular procedure done, why tongue piercing is legal and tongue splitting is not.
Callahan says the procedure is dangerous. He says there is risk of infection, allergic reaction. He says, essentially, that we are not capable of weighing risks and benefits, and need him to lead us by the hand and tell us what we can do to our own bodies.
He has not presented any evidence that tongue splitting is more dangerous that other plastic surgery procedures; the truth is that a human with a serpent’s tongue is a little creepy and some would like to see it outlawed.
Tongue splitting is the most victimless of victimless crimes. If I chose to cut my arm, as some people with certain mental disorders do, is it illegal? If I chose to let a doctor cut my ass open and suck out the fat, and pay him good money for it, is that illegal? Who am I hurting?
We made abortion legal because women were dying on kitchen tables in back-alley clinics. If someone with a split tongue is afraid of jail time and won’t go to a hospital when it swells up, and that person suffocates, who will pay the funeral bill? If a woman splits her own tongue, because the new bill doesn’t criminalize that, who is going to help her when she hemorrhages and dies of blood loss?
Are police going to start shaking down people with split tongues, demanding to know who their “splitter” is? Can an end-consumer tongue splitter get off on a plea bargain by turning in a higher-up in the splitting ring?
Does anyone else see how ridiculous this is?
A legal adult has the right to control his or her body. Such is the very essence of privacy. If I can’t do what I chose to my body, what’s next?
LIFE Copy Editor Heather Bell can be reached for comment via e-mail at bell1hm@yahoo.com.
