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:
“These are not the artificial forests of an English king,—a royal preserve merely. Here prevail no forest laws but those of nature. The aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Thus far women have been the mere echoes of men. Our laws and constitutions, our creeds and codes, and the customs of social life are all of masculine origin. The true woman is as yet a dream of the future. A just government, a humane religion, a pure social life await her coming.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“Our books of science, as they improve in accuracy, are in danger of losing the freshness and vigor and readiness to appreciate the real laws of Nature, which is a marked merit in the ofttimes false theories of the ancients.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)