Professor Grayson’s op-ed in The Globe. Well argued but goes a bit too far in wanting a “pure” secular model, with no accommodation whatsoever for religious reasons. My own thoughts on accommodation in general are here but I have no objection, for example, to sex segregated swimming hours, as a means to encourage participation of girls and women, but do object to sex-segregated academic instruction. As to his call for a provincial inquiry, the most recent example was the Bouchard-Taylor Commission of 2007, which played a useful role in debunking some of the more sensational media coverage and providing a sound intellectual framework for looking at reasonable accommodation issues.
Unlikely that Ontario will want to go down that route (don’t see advantages for any of the three political parties) but a useful starting point would be to see if York and other universities, as well as school boards, track accommodation requests, to assess the scope of the problem. Again, I am more in the world that is the lack of judgement rather than the lack of rules as per Coyne’s piece (York accommodation and Quebec values charter aren’t opposites, in fact they are the same):
It is also clear from reading these e-mail accounts that the moral confusion that characterized the York administration’s position is not confined to universities. Many pointed to the fact that in Ontario’s publicly funded primary and secondary schools, examples can be found of situations in which code-sanctioned prayer meetings segregate boys from girls. In other instances, parents can request that their children not be required to sit beside or work with members of the opposite sex. In some publicly funded swimming pools, boys are separated from girls for religious reasons.
Such accommodations are likely to engender feelings of inferiority in girls. Conversely, boys might mistakenly assume they are superior to girls. Such accommodations also likely provide a bad example for other students. Seeing or hearing of gendered segregation in his school, an impressionable 12-year-old boy may come to believe that separation between the sexes is acceptable. If some of his friends regard the girls in the prayer room as unworthy, he may come to view them the same way. Given these conditions, it would not be surprising to discover that once they got to university, some of these students would think it legitimate to request accommodations to avoid working with their female peers. Their previous education had taught them that if you asked for a religious accommodation, you got it.
There is evidence from my e-mails that in Ontario the rights of female students are suffering from religious compromise at all levels of education. Unfortunately, we do not know the full dimensions of this compromise, or its long-term effects on female students, on their male peers and, ultimately, on the value structure of our society.
For these reasons, we need an impartial provincial inquiry into these matters. On the basis of its findings, it might be possible to get the Human Rights Code back on track and more relevant to Ontarians of all faiths concerned with their daughters’ educations and futures.
York professor at centre of religious rights furor: Rights Code is the issue – The Globe and Mail.
Multicultural Meanderings 