The Uproar on Reasonable Accommodation at York is not about Gender Equality; It’s about Racism

Web Editor

The story has been well played out in the Canadian media: a student taking an online course at York University asks to be exempt from group work so he will not have to interact with female students, contra his religious beliefs; the professor raises objections; the university administration overrules the professor and heeds the student’s wishes. The backlash was immense, with the general tone of comments being that someone’s religious beliefs and our accommodation of those religious beliefs should stop at the point of “gender equality”.

Look: The accommodation requested (exemption from group work) was entirely reasonable. This costs the university and does not negatively impact any other student. A similar request to be exempt from on-campus group work was actually granted to a student who lived quite far away from York. Most importantly, it respects the religious beliefs of the student in question, allowing him to pursue his education without compromising his faith.

And then here’s the real problem with the criticism: This has nothing to do with gender equality.

Female students of York University are in no ways disadvantaged by attempts to accommodate this student’s religious beliefs.

Across Canada, there are churches, synagogues, and temples that forbid women from administering religious services or that bar them from accessing and advancing in the hierarchies of those religious institutions. These are violations of gender equality; they discriminate against women and prevent them from enjoying the privileges and opportunities that men enjoy in such religious communities.

And so there is immense public backlash against one student’s religious rights claim that does not disadvantage women in any way – that his request is repugnant and beyond the pale – while at the same time there is societal acceptance of places of worship that ban women from the clergy.

In one situation, the public says that religious beliefs should not be accommodated at all because one student holds a belief that he should not interact with members of the opposite sex; in the other situation, the public is entirely comfortable with an actual and quite severe violation of gender equality.

Simply put, it is because the majority is used to gender inequality in religious institutions – it’s familiar, it’s held by their religion (or the religion of their ancestors), and it’s part of the culture and history of the majority – and they are not used to that student’s views. The inconsistency is simply the product of wanting to think that our own practices and culture is normal and enlightened and acceptable and that the “other” is weird and barbaric and we should draw the line.

When the public is entirely inconsistent and consistently claims the moral high ground, it’s really nothing more than a refusal to look at religious issues critically and an insistence that our way is better than everyone else’s and that people who are different are morally abhorrent.

Consider the debate over religious symbols in Québec: the public sphere must be entirely secular and no displays of religion are acceptable, says the Marois government, with the support of much of the Québec public. Turbans and headscarves are obvious threats to Québec’s secular values, but an enormous cross atop Montréal’s Mount Royal and a large crucifix behind the chair of the Speaker in provincial legislature are apparently totally acceptable. Despite the fact that overtly Roman Catholic symbols dominate the skyline of the province’s biggest city and literally hang over the Speaker’s chair in the National Assembly, these are not threats to the secular order because they are part of Québec’s “history” and “culture”.

The irony of attacks on religious minorities, whether they are done in the name of gender equality, or secularism, or to further integration, is that they often backfire and usually work against the goals they were enacted to advance. When religious groups feel under attack and when they are singled out and othered, they usually turn inward, become more insular, and become alienated with the rest of society. Reformers within those faiths are seen as traitors who are trying to undermine a faith under siege from the inside.

Enlightenment thought is the triumph of reason over arbitrariness. The inconsistency in how we deal with religious beliefs – depending on whether they are our beliefs or the beliefs of the minority – exposes our society as arbitrary and illiberal on matters of religious accommodation. And yes, it exposes much of the (extremely inconsistent) outrage as racist.

So please: Do not disguise shameful and arbitrary attacks on religious minorities as efforts to advance liberal values. They are affronts to the very concept of liberalism and Enlightenment.

Categories:
Tags:

Advertisement

Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.