Professor Grayson’s Crusade

J Paul Grayson, a sociology professor at York
University in Toronto,
received
a request
from a male student asking to be excused from participating in a
group assignment, in which the student would have been obliged to converse with
female students.

Grayson
said no to the student but decided to use his request to test York University’s
administration—beginning with his Dean—to see how they would deal with it. The
administrators in fact decided that since no rights of female students were
being withheld, the student’s request could be accommodated.

At that point, Grayson seized the opportunity that the administration’s
response afforded him and leaked the details of this case to the media,
dragging half of Canada into a proverbial tempest in a teapot that centered on
the looming supposed dangers of religious accommodation.

The Quebec government—which is in the throes of proposing legislation intended
to prevent people who wear religiously significant clothing from working in the
public sector—was absolutely delighted.
As
reported by Toronto’s Globe and Mail
, Grayson had already tipped off
secularists when he came out in support of Quebec’s so-called Charter of Values.
An
affront to religious freedom
, this Charter is designed to bully minorities,
and especially Muslim immigrants, into assimilation in Canada’s mostly
French-speaking, largely lapsed Catholic province.

What to make of this bewildering feeding frenzy? Three things, to start with.

First, focusing only on the particular legal dimensions of this particular request
for accommodation,
this
adroit analysis
by Cardus’ Albertos Polizogopoulos claims that York’s
administration was actually correct to recommend granting it. Polizogopoulos
states:

We may not agree with the beliefs that underlie this
student’s request, but his requested means of accommodation does not violate
anyone else’s rights. . . . Men and women have the right not to be
discriminated against on the basis of their sex, but there’s no right for men
or women to be in a study group with students who may not want to be in a group
with people of the opposite sex. There is no legal balancing of rights
necessary in this case because there are no competing rights in this case. If
the student had asked for female students to be excluded from the classes he participated
in, that would be a case of competing rights. In the balancing of rights in
that scenario, request denied!

He adds that sincerity of belief is the legally
established criterion on which such accommodations can and should be made.
Again, that’s not a sociological or theological criterion (i.e. not mine or
anyone else’s), but it’s the legal one in Canada:

In law, so long as the religious belief is sincere, it
doesn’t matter whether it’s shared by all or most other people subscribing to a
specific faith system. At least that is the opinion the Supreme Court of Canada
has expressed on several occasions.

Does this mean that accommodations like the one
requested by the male student be granted however? I say: No. Why? Because, as a
Jewish journalist
has
observed
, the questions of sincerity and credibility are central to the
university’s mission. And, besides, this issue is not primarily a legal issue,
it is a pedagogical one and it should never have gained the attention of
lawyers.

Hence, point two: Was the request for accommodation actually made in such a way
that
the Dean had to be involved? Again, no. The student withdrew his
request when Grayson initially said no, something that Cardus’ Peter
Stockland has dissected
in
his inimitable way
.

Up until this point, Grayson did the right and honorable thing and
just said no—
and, the student did the right thing by withdrawing his
silly request. What happened after common sense prevailed is where things get
silly and cunning at the same time.

Grayson doesn’t get religion or like religion. How do we know this?
Well, after saying no to the student, he turned what could have been a mere blip
in any professor’s day into malice aforethought. According to him, if this
student were to be accommodated, it would set off a chain reaction. Religion might
deploy all manner of sexist and racist social practices that would overwhelm us
like a tsunami . . . you see. The quote he gave for
the Globe and Mail
reporter is a real sendup:

“You have to nip this in the bud, because what you’re
dealing with here is a basic hornet’s nest,” Dr. Grayson said in an interview.
“What if . . . I said, well, my religion really frowns upon my interacting with
blacks?”

You know. All those racist religions out there waiting
in the wings.

Grayson followed
with his
own op-ed
, where he reports on the support he has received from
various people:

The people I’m talking about are not rednecks who
believe Canada should be reserved for white, native-born Christians. They are
native- and foreign-born Canadians of all faiths who put secular human rights
for everyone ahead of parochial religious rights.

You see where this is going, right? Rights are
not simply rights. Instead, human rights are “secular.” Religious rights (which
we want to remind Grayson are deemed fundamental in section two of
Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms) are deemed by him “parochial.”

This is astonishing bigotry. By baptizing the concept of human rights with the
moniker of “secular,” Grayson inverts the history in which human rights
actually developed on the basis of the Judeo-Christian belief in the dignity
and value of each human being. You don’t need as straightforward a
narrative as Rodney Stark’s to see that
Grayson’s reading of history is tendentious.

But Grayson isn’t finished yet. In his op-ed, the segregation of males and
females anywhere and everywhere must be thwarted. He observes, “In some publicly funded swimming pools, boys are separated
from girls for religious reasons.”

Well, civilization is over then isn’t it? But Grayson has conveniently overlooked one teeny weeny fact in his
swimming pool example hasn’t he?

Typically, it’s the
women who want to
swim without men around for reasons that should be so obvious as to not merit
mention. I’ve spoken with young Muslim female university students here in
Montreal who have had a terrible time trying to be excused from high school
class trips to swimming pools and beaches. They see clear as a bell the problem
of what those excursions entail for young women in a highly sexualized culture.
But in Grayson’s world, the toleration of segregation along gender lines would
be to aid and abet sexism, even if it’s the women who seek it! He tries to hide
his lack of insight by imagining the worst and tying it to the conceivable. In
his mind, segregation of the sexes can only result in the consequence that: “Boys
might mistakenly assume they are superior to girls.”

To which we can confidently respond: Well, some boys
might believe in this idea, but not as an effect of segregation. Not per se. There’s
no proof whatsoever. Belief in the superiority of one’s sex surely depends on many
factors. You’d think this would be something a sociologist would want to allow
for, to say the least.

I myself would be surprised if it could be
empirically demonstrated that boys who
attend single-sex schools believe—in disproportionate numbers compared with
boys who attend public/co-ed schools—that males are superior than females. In
fact, my own anecdotal experience with teens who attend the many (private) sex
segregated schools in Montreal reveals, if anything, that the reverse is
probably true, so long as we define the equal regard for the opposite sex without
ideological blinders.

If Grayson is concerned about sexism,
he should pick up his sociological notepad and pen and go do a survey about
what are the top five sexist practices that women find annoying, fearful or
distressing. I’ll bet that one of the top five is lewd remarks about physical
appearance in mixed company. But Grayson’s fear of segregation is
based not on social science but on his irrational fear of religion.

And this is why the professor’s little media adventure is so disingenuous:
After making the right decision, he tried to show that religion is the root of
small evils—and big ones too. Any big ones you can imagine. Too bad he left
common sense and rationality behind in the process of publicizing his
vindictiveness, because whole segments of the Canadian elite took the cue and
threw some mud at religion. Any excuse will do apparently.

Dr. Paul Allen, Associate Professor, Department
of Theological Studies, Concordia University, Montreal.

Become a fan of First Things on Facebook, subscribe to First Things via RSS, and follow First Things on Twitter.