They have to be separated in school

Thurgood Marshall arguing Brown v Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1953.

I got the feeling on hearing the discussion yesterday that when you put a white child in a school with a whole lot of colored children, the child would fall apart or something. Everybody knows that is not true.  Those same kids in Virginia and South Carolina – and I have seen them do it – they play in the streets together, they play on their farms together, they go down the road together, they separate to go to school, they come out of school and play ball together. They have to be separated in school. There is some magic to it. You can have them voting together, you can have them not restricted because of law in the houses they live in. You can have them going to the same state university and the same college, but if they go to elementary and high school, the world will fall apart. [Read more…]

How to ensure that no one is unlawfully excluded

Nicola Dandridge of Universities UK has written a blog post explaining that UUK is not promoting gender segregation. That’s nice, but I don’t know of anyone who said it was. The objection is that UUK is treating gender segregation as permissible, and that it said it’s not unequal.

Since its publication, there has been some public debate on a small component of the guidance: a hypothetical case study (p.27) in which an external speaker on faith in the modern world requests that the audience is segregated according to gender. The case study reflects the challenges of accommodating everyone’s views, from those whose religious beliefs require them to sit separately with their own gender, to those who wish to sit with the opposite gender – hence the mixed seating alternative which is part of the solution in this case study. The issue is how to ensure that no one is unlawfully excluded from the event.

Ah that’s sneaky. The case study reflects the challenges of accommodating everyone’s views, from those whose religious beliefs require them to sit separately with their own gender – no no no, it’s not that easy. The religious beliefs “require” that everyone sit with her or his own gender. [Read more…]

He “knew it was not appropriate to sit next to women”

What a claustrophobic mind we see in this post claiming that Maryam’s petition against Universities UK’s guidelines that allow sexual segregation at the behest of guest speakers is “Islamophobic.”

Petition site Avaaz are running asking people to condemn Universities UK’s statement on sex segregation in events held on campus. Please DON’T sign it. It might use intellectual language, but its both factually dubious and distinctly Islamphobic. [Read more…]

At the European Parliament

Taslima has a post about her trip to Strasburg for the 25th Sakharov Prize anniversary.

I tweeted a lot in the last few days. I was at the European Parliament to celebrate 25th Sakharov Prize anniversary. All the Sakharov Laureates were there except Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Hu Jia, Jafar Panahi and a few others. Shirin Ebadi the Nobel Peace Prize winner came to represent Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian lawyer who received Sakharov Prize last year. We attended many conferences, seminars on Human Rights, official lunch and dinner.

But she didn’t get to talk to Malala Yousafzai. [Read more…]

Literal patriarchy

Aha so Doug Phillips of Vision Forum has resigned as top boss of VF because he had An Affair with A Woman. The blog Diary of an Autodidact has a thorough analysis.

Douglas Phillips has three major claims to fame, all of which are related to a certain view of gender.

The first, as I partially discussed in my post on his connections to White Supremacy, is his belief that there is a single explanation for modern evils. Let me state this clearly, because I think it tends to be lost in all the static.

The foundation, the CORE of the Vision Forum doctrine is that “Feminism™” is THE cause of all modern evils. [Read more…]

EXMNA

I’m very late in catching up with the Ex-Muslims of North America. The prod was seeing a tweet of mine – about Universities UK and the gender segregation trainwreck – favorited by Sadaf, and looking to see who she is. She’s one of the founders.

While not fully comprehending the gender essentialism ingrained in the religion and its practices, Sadaf always felt that gender equality would never be attainable under Islam or her own Afghan culture. and has since pursued the creation of an inclusive safe-space for Ex-Muslims. While working with the Toronto group and staying connected with the global online communities, Sadaf has come to know the dangers, the troubles, and the alienation of being an Ex-Muslim. Ever since, Sadaf became a Community Organizer and aids North Americans in creating a safe-space of their own. Sadaf’s goal is to have an Ex-Muslim group in most major North American cities and to help others find strength and solidarity through our communities. [Read more…]

The confusion thickens

The Independent seems to have a very bizarre understanding of the Universities UK guidance on how to manage guest speakers.

The document comes out in the wake of a number of incidents where freedom of speech has been threatened – in particular an Egyptian speaker at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies was forced to abandon a speech largely because of protests from the Muslim Brotherhood.

In addition, research by Student Rights, a pro-equality group, shows that there were 180 cases of radical preachers speaking at university events in the year up to March 2013. It shows some ways in which freedom of speech can be preserved even if the speaker is controversial – such as segregating different sections into different parts of the room as in the case of an ultra-right religious speaker arousing protests from feminists. (In a recent case, a speaker at University College London insisted the audience be segregated before he agreed to speak). [Read more…]

The bus from hell

Meanwhile, also at UK universities, there’s laddish “banter”…

This week, a video of the men’s hockey team at the University of Stirling appeared on YouTube, showing the male students on a packed bus, engaged in a shouted chant. The chant, filmed on a mobile phone, begins: “I used to work in Chicago, in a department store …” and becomes increasingly misogynistic, racist and offensive as the journey progresses. Now the video has been viewed tens of thousands of times online, the University says it has launched an investigation.

But this video represents so much more than a single, isolated incident. In just two horribly uncomfortable minutes, it sums up the reality of what female students are facing up and down the country – a reality that isn’t going away. [Read more…]

Designs by a wonderfully acid British cartoonist

Nick Cohen has a piece in the Observer on censorship at UK universities. He starts, as he should, with Chris and Abhishek.

On the morning of 3 October, Chris Moos and Abhishek Phadnis put on joke T-shirts, of the kind students wear the world over, and went to man the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society stall at the London School of Economics freshers’ fair. The bullying the university authorities visited upon them for the next 36 hours should provoke the most important free speech court case to hit British universities in years. It certainly deserves to. [Read more…]