We can love our diverse neighbours without kowtowing to their every prejudice

We can love our diverse neighbours without kowtowing to their every prejudice - Telegraph

I was having an argument with a Left-wing friend. “The way I see it,” he said, “rules to govern diversity, they’re just a way of taking the rough edges off a society.” He looked at me, and I did wonder: how do you disagree with such an assertion? “The problem with your approach,” he continued, “is that you would leave the weakest people in society to find their own way.”

I don’t think that society should be smooth; and I don’t think that the laws protect the weak. But let’s assume he might have a point. All those laws and bizarre prosecutions: they’re only to take the rough edges away. I remembered that conversation when I read about a protest in a school in London. Pupils – sorry, “students” – were protesting because the school’s administrators had removed a vertical sheet from the multi-faith prayer and “quiet” room. Specifically, Muslim students were protesting, because they had erected the sheet in order to segregate the male and female pupils, lest they had to endure the apparently unacceptable insult of witnessing someone with a slightly different chromosomal disposition also in the act of prayer. Business student Kamil Alp said: “It’s very inappropriate if a man does it [prays] in the presence of a woman.”

How far we have come! Schools and colleges now have to set aside rooms for “faith” – for which, of course, read Islamic prayer – and what was once a common space in a college is now just another line in the sand being crossed, prostrate business student by prostrate business student. “I feel discriminated against,” added Kamil. The young man knows his stuff! And I know how he feels.

I remembered my conversation again when I read about Adrian Smith, a manager for a housing trust, punished severely by his employers – to the tune of a cut of £14,000 in his salary – because in the course of a private conversation on his Facebook page, he’d written – calmly, politely – that he could not support gay marriage. I don’t happen to agree with Mr Smith, but our theoretical disagreement pales into insignificance compared to the bullying retribution enacted on him by his employer, for the audacity of expressing a perfectly reasonable view. One of his employers said, “The Trust has an equal opportunities policy.” Case closed. Those equal opportunities policies exist to smooth away our rough edges, and Mr Smith will just have to take the smoothing with the rough.

These two cases, involving very different people (Mr Smith is plainly a good man; Mr Alp makes the news because he appears determined to promote divisions, both metaphorical and literal) illustrate what happens with these well-intentioned (let us be charitable: the alternative is too hideous to contemplate) laws. Mr Alp’s campaign – can you imagine being a timid student in his year? – serves too as a warning that we need greater care with the inspection of faith schools, whose number will surely rise following the Government’s campaign to expand the number of providers in the state education sector.