A jaw-dropper from York University in Toronto.

After refusing to honour a male student’s request to be separated from his female classmates for religious reasons, a York University professor has found himself at odds with administrators who assert he broke their “obligation to accommodate.”

Say WHAT???

There’s an obligation to accommodate a male student’s request to be “separated” from female students? Are you fucking kidding me? 

Do these administrators not realize where this goes? It goes back to what we’ve been struggling to escape from for centuries. Men getting “separation” from women means women are imprisoned in seclusion, purdah, the harem, the kitchen. It is not something that should be “accommodated” in a university or anywhere else public. (Except a church or mosque or temple? No, actually, not except those. If women don’t want to be separated, then no, I don’t think male requests for separation should be “accommodated.” But I get that that’s usually not something for outsiders to mess with [unless perhaps the women ask them to]. But on principle? No. No, I don’t think such requests should be accommodated, even in religious buildings.)

The professor ran the student’s initial memo past a Judaic scholar and two Islamic scholars, all of whom were puzzled by the request.

The Judaic scholar found no problem with an Orthodox Jew attending a co-ed group session. One of the Islamic scholars, in turn, declared simply, “unless he is asked to be physical with a female student, which I assume he isn’t, there is absolutely no justification for not interacting with females in public space.”

Mr. Grayson’s colleagues appeared to agree. At an October departmental meeting they passed a resolution forbidding any religious accommodations that contributed to the “marginalizations of other students, faculty or teaching assistants.”

And the student backed off. Grayson said the student was a reasonable guy. All was copacetic…except not quite.

Nevertheless, the rejection incensed university brass. According to Mr. Grayson, on October 18, he received a letter from the Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies ordering him to accommodate the student’s wishes.

As per documents provided by the professor, one of the keystones of the Dean’s position is the assertion that allowing the student to opt out of female interaction would not affect the “experience of other students in the class”—provided the professor kept quiet about it.

Oh yeah? So of course Grayson, being a sociologist, surveyed his female students, who saw the matter rather differently.

The response confirmed his suspicions. Female students in particular reacted with outrage and even threats of legal action.

“What if the male student asked that the women be seated at the back of the class or on the other side of a partition so that he would not have to see them?” wrote one.

What if a white student requested separation from non-white students? The parallel is obvious enough, except apparently to the Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University…which is a pretty shocking state of affairs. “Liberal” Arts? Really? You sure about that?

The Dean dismissed the November survey, saying he was not “persuaded that other students’ political views on the subject are either a relevant or an appropriate consideration.”

“I am unpersuaded that it is even arguable that the non-participation of this one male student in group work affects in any way any other student’s human rights,” he wrote.

As York’s winter semester kicks off, said Mr. Grayson, the order is still standing.

“There’s been no reversal of position,” he said.

The Facebook page Separate is never equal urges writing to the Dean.

Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies of York University Martin Singer ordered Professor Paul Grayson to “accommodate” the wishes of a student who requested to be separated from his female classmates for religious reasons.

Dean Singer said that allowing the student to opt out of female interaction would not affect the “experience of other students in the class”—provided the Professor Grayson kept quiet about it. In an October 18 email, the Dean specifically told Prof Grayson that if he was worried about the “course experience of our female students” he would make sure they “are not made aware of the accommodation.”

This is simply outrageous. The issue has not been resolved yet, so please email Dean Singer to tell him about our experience with gender segregation in the UK, how it affects vulnerable students and the huge reputational damage Universities UK had for condoning gender segregation.

martin.singer@yorku.ca

You can also tweet here: https://twitter.com/YorkUnews

You know your duty.

Update: there is a petition to sign. Well done Kiran Opal for creating it. Thank you Kausik for pointing it out.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Via Leo Igwe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reAVJ9m3P2k

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Pew did a survey on -

well this is how they titled the summary:

How people in Muslim countries prefer women to dress in public

Which is annoying, because there aren’t “Muslim countries.” Even the ones that have constitutions saying Islam is the official religion aren’t “Muslim countries”…

…but never mind, one knows what they mean.

Then again it’s annoying for another reason, which is that it sounds so bossy.

Never mind, never mind – what about the survey?

It’s depressing. Almost everyone in every country surveyed thinks women should have their heads bandages up to one degree or another. Lebanon did manage a whopping 49% who think no bandage at all is best, but even that is under half. In Saudi Arabia 63% opt for the black bag with a slit for the eyes.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Liberty is not happy about the Anti-social Behaviour Crime and Policing Bill.

The Anti-social Behaviour Crime and Policing Bill proposes to replace existing orders (such as ASBOs) with a new  generation of injunctions which are easier to obtain, harder to comply with and have harsher penalties.

The Bill would also introduce unfair double punishment for the vulnerable, as social tenants and their families will face mandatory eviction for breaching a term of an injunction.

Other measures in the Bill include some restrictions on Schedule 7 stop and search powers which, while welcome, unfortunately come nowhere near addressing the dangerous breadth and intrusiveness of these powers.

The Bill also weakens key safeguards in our already heavily-criticised extradition system by removing the automatic right of appeal against extradition orders.

Another item to keep a beady eye on then.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Dan Bye on He looked it up in a dictionary.

Those who think the law as written is potentially a danger to free speech are quite correct, and it’s also worth noting that it mirrors the law in relation to snail mail, originally dating to 1935, where case law has established (my source is the commentary in Halsbury’s Laws of England) that “The test of obscenity is objective and the character of the addressee is immaterial.”

In the wake of the Gay News Trial in the UK, the then editor of The Freethinker, the late great Bill McIlroy, was fined for sending copies of the poem through the post. He was hoping to trigger another blasphemy prosecution at the time, but the authorities sidestepped that embarrassment by using different legislation!

The current law in relation to post, if anyone wants to look it up is ss.85 of the Postal Services Act 2000:

(3) A person commits an offence if he sends by post a postal packet which encloses—

(a) any indecent or obscene print, painting, photograph, lithograph, engraving, cinematograph film or other record of a picture or pictures, book, card or written communication, or

(b) any other indecent or obscene article (whether or not of a similar kind to those mentioned in paragraph (a)).

Similar laws apply to telephone communication.

It’s also worth noting that there is case law in relation to all this, so you have to read the laws in relation to the way cases have been decided.

In relation to “menacing”, that was tested in the successful appeal in Chambers v DPP (the airport bombing joke on Twitter case), where context was found to be important. The judges in that case also said:

Satirical, or iconoclastic, or rude comment, the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, banter or humour, even if distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it should and no doubt will continue at their customary level, quite undiminished by this legislation. Given the submissions by Mr Cooper, we should perhaps add that for those who have the inclination to use “Twitter” for the purpose, Shakespeare can be quoted unbowdlerised, and with Edgar, at the end of King Lear, they are free to speak not what they ought to say, but what they feel.

Which of course might help you win if you got to trial, but wouldn’t necessarily stop a prosecution in the first place.

“Grossly offensive” was tested in Collins v DPP (2006). According to Halsbury’s:

It is for the justices to determine as a question of fact whether a message is grossly offensive for these purposes, applying the standards of an open and just multi-racial society (ie via the application of reasonably enlightened, but not perfectionist, contemporary standards); and the words must be judged in the context of the message and all relevant circumstances

So whether something is “indecent” or “obscene” is an objective test based on community standards, but whether something is “offensive” can take other aspects into consideration.

Halsburys:

Whether a message falls into the category of grossly offensive depends on whether it is couched in terms liable to cause gross offence to those to whom it relates

and:

For an offence to be committed the defendant has to intend his words to be grossly offensive to those to whom they relate, or be aware that they might be taken to be so.

The Collins case, by the way, involved racist language via telephone and telephone answerphone to the office of an MP over 2 years. At the original trial the charges were dismissed, the language found to be offensive but not grossly offensive, and arising from frustration at the way his, Collins’, concerns were being dealt with. The DPP appealed, and won.

The judgment is worth reading.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

From the Borowitz Report at the New Yorker - dateline Minnepolis:

The so-called polar vortex caused hundreds of injuries across the Midwest today, as people who said “so much for global warming” and similar comments were punched in the face.

Stay safe, people.

The meteorology professor Davis Logsdon, of the University of Minnesota, issued a safety warning to residents of the states hammered by the historic low temperatures: “If you are living within the range of the polar vortex and you have something idiotic to say about climate change, do not leave your house.”

Say it to the mirror, or the dog.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Conor Friedersdorf gets what the problem is with the kind of harassment women are subject to online, although he didn’t at first. He didn’t until he guest-blogged for Megan McArdle.

My stint running her page while she vacationed included the keys to the blog’s inbox. Even as someone who’d previously blogged about immigration in California’s Inland Empire, fielding insults and aggressive invective as vile as any I could imagine, I was shocked by a subset of her blog’s correspondence. To this day, I don’t know if I was experiencing a typical or atypical week. Perhaps in the abstract, there isn’t any threat more extreme than the death threats I’d received and brushed off as unserious. But I read emails and comments addressed at McArdle that expanded my notion of how disturbing online vitriol could be. And it took my actually reading them for my perspective to change.  

I’d never been exposed to anything like it before.

Later, when my duties included reading email sent to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish, I discovered that gay men, too, are subject to this sort of comment that was previously invisible to me: not just over-the-top invective, but intensely personal missives of hyper-sexualized hate.

That is exactly right. Yet he says it’s the best he can do but it’s inadequate…

That’s the best I can do to sum them up, but it’s an inadequate description. And an excerpt wouldn’t much help, because to really understand how it feels to read these missives (to the extent that someone other than the intended recipient can even begin to understand), it’s necessary to experience their regularity. Instead of a lone jerk heckling you as you walk down a major street, imagine dozens of different people channeling the same hyper-aggressive hatefulness, popping up repeatedly on random blocks for hours on end. That’s what some bloggers had to endure over the course of years to make it.

See? Isn’t that exactly what I said in response to those stupid tweets by fleetstreetfox this morning? Yes it is.

I began to ask female friends if they experienced this same phenomenon. And not only were they close to unanimous in avowing that they did—many also cited a weariness at gendered online abuse to explain why they either shuttered their personal blogs and stopped writing for the public, or shifted their journalistic efforts to a traditional format rather than the more personalized blog format. This is the very time that people like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein were building the personal blogs from which they would become successful national pundits. One wonders how many equally talented women we missed out on reading due to misogynists hurling vile invective at rising female journalists.

Oh, no, we don’t wonder that, because we can be perfectly sure none of them were equally talented, because they are after all women.

Sorry, bitter sarcasm. But this is why I find the line about “stop whining and just do a great job” so very annoying.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Madeleine Teahan (that seems like a peculiarly Proustian or edible sort of name) muses in a post at the Catholic Herald (yes, that would be the well-known, even “iconic”, religion of the same name) about gender equality and toys for girls versus boys. She wants everyone to realize that men have problems too, because sadly that fact has entirely disappeared in all the noise about princess dolls.

Is there anything really wrong with encouraging our sons to play with cars and our daughters to play with Barbie? There is a strange paradox with modern-day champions of diversity: it is that they are determined to propagate the idea that we are all exactly the same. Accepting common differences between the sexes has become taboo.

A spot of having it both ways there. The naughty champions of diversity say we are all exactly the same, when they should be saying that all girls are exactly the same and all boys are exactly the same but girls are radically different from boys and vice versa.

She’s wrong. The point isn’t that everybody is exactly the same, the point is that everybody isn’t, and therefore tastes shouldn’t be imposed (or “encouraged”) on the basis of gender. There is something wrong with assuming that all girls do and should want to play with Barbie.

Just as with femininity, traditional masculinity should be welcomed and honed, not suppressed or abolished. The fanatical emphasis on gender equality risks bulldozing men completely out of the picture, leaving them at a loss as to what role models it is socially acceptable to aspire to and how exactly they should fit into society.

Although it is often perceived as the enemy of equality between the sexes, the Church has a lot to offer men

That caused me to burst into laughter instead of reading the rest of the sentence. I just love that. “The church has a lot to offer men…” – yes, it does, especially if they’re the kind of men who want a monopoly on saying what’s what. One thing the church has to offer men of that type is the fact that it’s the last big institution that is still allowed to mandate and enforce an all-male power structure.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Two people – one woman and one man – have pled guilty to sending menacing messages to Caroline Criado-Perez.

Isabella Sorley, 23, of Newcastle, and John Nimmo, 25, of South Shields, admitted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court sending the messages over a public communications network.

…

Alison Morgan, prosecuting, said Ms Criado-Perez had received abusive messages “of one type or another” from 86 Twitter accounts including those accounts attributed to both Nimmo and Sorley.

“Caroline Criado-Perez has suffered life-changing psychological effects from the abuse which she received on Twitter,” she told the court.

“In particular, the menacing nature of the tweets sent by both defendants caused her significant fear that they would find her and carry out their threats.”

The court heard that one tweet from Sorley started with an expletive and continued: “Die you worthless piece of crap.” She was also told “go kill yourself”.

…

The court heard Nimmo targeted Ms Creasy with the message “The things I cud do to u (smiley face)” and called her “Dumb blond…” followed by an offensive word.

What offensive word? “Cunt” obviously. The others wouldn’t be “offensive” enough to be worth mentioning.

Following the hearing, Ms Criado-Perez told BBC Radio 4′s PM programme: “I’m really relieved that they pleaded guilty and it meant that we don’t have to drag this out any further and have a whole trial about it.

“This is a small drop in the ocean, not just in terms of the amount of abuse that I was sent, where way more people than just two were involved, but also women in general, the amount of abuse that they get online and how few people see any form of justice.”

Yeah.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Short walk but it’s 30° below zero Centigrade.

Yikes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqajj8DvqvU

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Via Taslima on Twitter, a news story on violence against Hindus after the elections in Bangladesh.

Hundreds of Hindu families who fled their homes following post-poll violence in different districts on Sunday are scared to return as the administration could not ensure their security.

As soon as the voting ended on Sunday afternoon, BNP and Jamaat-Shibir men looted, vandalised and burned Hindu houses in Thakurgaon, Dinajpur, Rangpur, Bogra, Lalmonirhat, Rajshahi, Chittagong and Jessore.

The raids remind many of the atrocities by the Pakistani occupation forces and their collaborators in 1971.

“We left our house in 1971 as the Pakistan army and razakars set fire to our village. And we are passing through the same ordeal in 2014,” lamented Bishwajit Sarkar of Malopara village in Abhaynagar, Jessore.

A piece in the Dhaka Tribune has more:

 …around 150 people attacked Hindus at Malopara of Chapatola village soon after the 10th parliamentary elections ended on Sunday. Crude bombs were blasted, houses were vandalised, valuables were looted and at least 12 houses were set on fire, leaving the locals panicked. Miscreants also attacked Hindus at Kornai village in Dinajpur on Sunday. They vandalised and torched houses and business establishments. The press statement also said: “The current situation of the country is threatening to undermine democracy, peace, religious tolerance and harmony. The failure of the administration to pacify the situation is obvious.”

I didn’t find anything specifically about anti-Hindu violence at the BBC but it does report terrible violence before during and after the elections with accounts by people living with it. Nabila is one:

I, and many others like myself, do not care about the elections any more.

What we care about most right now is the security of our lives.

So many people have been killed due to political violence in the last three months, many of them torched alive inside buses. What sort of people are we? Do we qualify to be called human any more?

I am a student and I have to use buses to get around as it’s the cheapest form of travel. Each time I get on a bus in my city, it is an ordeal and I spend every second of the journey worried that a petrol bomb will be hurled at the bus.

We are incredibly frightened, we can’t live like this any more.

I was born in Dhaka and I have never felt this scared in my life.

I want the situation to get better because when I finish my studies, I want to work in Bangladesh, I want to be a part of its future.

So that’s tragic.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

But, from a couple of months ago, a young sports writer called Jim Pagels explained at Slate that Twitter death threats are just a joke and everybody should ignore them.

Just about every week, it seems there’s a story about a celebrity, athlete, or politician receiving death threats from morons on Twitter. The media often treat these frivolous incidents like they’re a fatwa on Salman Rushdie. The latest example: New York Giants running back Brandon Jacobs, for performing poorly on fantasy football teams. (Fitting there be fantasy threats for a fantasy sport.)

The stories often give the impression that this is some kind of shocking event for which we should pity the “victims,” but anyone who’s spent 10 minutes online knows that these assertions are entirely toothless.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More on the campaign against women on the internet: Amanda Hess on Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.

A woman doesn’t even need to occupy a professional writing perch at a prominent platform to become a target. According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking the online lives of Americans for more than a decade, women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women. We are more likely to report being stalked and harassed on the Internet—of the 3,787 people who reported harassing incidents from 2000 to 2012 to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, 72.5 percent were female. Sometimes, the abuse can get physical: A Pew survey reported that five percent of women who used the Internet said “something happened online” that led them into “physical danger.” And it starts young: Teenage girls are significantly more likely to be cyberbullied than boys. Just appearing as a woman online, it seems, can be enough to inspire abuse. In 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7.

This isn’t good. It isn’t a good arrangement. It’s a barrier where there shouldn’t be a barrier. It’s an obstacle, a deterrent, a disincentive, to half the population. That should not be happening.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)