Laws
The legality of tongue splitting will vary greatly depending on the country and within those countries, individual states or territories. Some examples are given below, but do not encompass all the laws regarding this subject.
Some branches of the U.S. military ban body modifications that detract from a professional military image and explicitly include tongue splitting or forking as examples.
Illinois was the first state in the U.S. to make tongue splitting illegal in 2003. Since then New York, Delaware, and Texas have enacted laws that either ban the practice, ban the procedure on minors without parental consent or restricted it to being performed by only doctors and/or dentists.
In 2009, the Australian state of Victoria enacted a ban on splitting the tongues of minors.
Read more about this topic: Tongue Splitting
Famous quotes containing the word laws:
“The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature—were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“It ain’t no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don’t break any.”
—Mae West, U.S. actor, screenwriter, and A. Edward Sutherland. Peaches O’Day (Mae West)
“While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue, I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)