The Star headline got it wrong: “York University student’s request not to work with women poses dilemma.”

There is no dilemma here and only one proper response: No.

No to segregating males and females.

No to religious accommodation of any type at Canadian campuses.

No to the absurdity of human rights departments that turn themselves into black holes of ethical relativism.

No to academic officials who twist themselves into pretzels of gutlessness, rather than take an honorable scholastic and moral stance.

The Star headline got it wrong (though politically correct) because there is no dilemma afoot up at York, only the mincing footsteps of some cowardly and overly compliant — over-obliging — tall foreheads of academe. Or, as sociology professor J. Paul Grayson stated it in one of his many interviews over the past 48 hours, this one with the Toronto Sun’s Michele Mandel: “You lose sight of the values you try to protect and you cling to the procedure.”

That’s the crux of the thing.

The eggheads and human rights zealots are cling-ons.

They have become Stockholm syndrome hostages to procedurals, blinded to the wisdom of common sense and deaf to rational judgment.

They can no longer see the inconsistencies of their own anal arguments. At a time when human rights decisions are quite rightly being challenged across the country for the foolishness of narrow-minded pronouncements — this is a self-perpetuating industry that’s actually made a mockery of human rights — York U’s bureaucrats cleave to discredited canons and jerry-rigged principles. That’s their doctrinaire approach.

As everyone knows by now, Grayson — with four decades experience and little to fear by way of retribution from his employer — rejected an online student’s bid to opt out of a group project that would have required him, on a single occasion, to interact with female classmates. We, the X-chromosome species, are not only untouchable but apparently not-to-be-associated-with either, at all, in a purportedly secular classroom setting.

I know of no religion that makes this proscription, though patriarchal and misogynistic cultures certainly do — the misinterpretation of religious dogma and texts. I’ve had men of various faiths, pieties, refuse to shake my hand. This has nearly always been in the Middle East and Central Asia, in Muslim-majority societies.

More Rosie DiManno columns on Thestar.com

The religious affiliation of this student has not been revealed. God forbid a Canadian institution would release any relevant details about faith, gender, age; this too is the outcome of burrowing human rights legislation cross-pollinated with privacy laws, at least as those same institutions have been allowed to interpret them.

It’s entirely possible Student Y is an Orthodox Jew or far right Christian or, I don’t know, a dingbat woman-hating cult adherent. But let’s not be disingenuous here. The reason the policy elites, the forelock-tugging apologists, at York rendered their ruling against Grayson — both department dean and director of the university’s Centre for Human Rights directed him to accommodate the see-no-girls student — is the fallout of Muslim hypersensitivity. That’s hypersensitivity towards Islam and hypersensitivity by Muslims, a both-ways phenomenon that has placed religious values at the centre of secular life in Western nations — where it does not belong.

I will leave it for theocratic experts to debate whether Islam is a great religion, though I suspect it is — in that Islam has changed the course of both history and geopolitics. Certainly it’s a muscular, proselytizing creed. And in the Western world, for all the wrong reasons, many fear it. We do not want to upset it, or at least not its most flimsily-provoked and violence-inclined radicals. Nor do we wish to be accused of Islamophobia, a neologism invented by commentary whiners and human rights centurions who are endlessly keen to drop an -ism on somebody’s head.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

So, student Y may not be Muslim but our lavishly indulgent response to faith-driven objections is what’s nurtured such wrong-headed, un-Solomonic decision-making as now on display at York, the timidity of the authorities, and this at a school where — when I was a teenager living in the vicinity — shut down for the Jewish High Holidays and nobody who wasn’t Jewish got their noses out of joint over it. Of course, this is no longer on at York because, well, that would make Jews special, no?

It’s interminably about doing not the clearly right thing, the morally correct thing — this is not quantum physics or PhD doctorate stuff here — but about doing what’s most likely to survive on appeal in a human rights star chamber, or in the courts.

I would remind you, by the way, that pious Islam has also tried to reinvent Canadian courtrooms, in the way at least some people up at York are willing to accept — whether for religious reasons or not; again we don’t know for sure — the lesser status of females, which strikes at the very heart of Western values. How quickly we have come to trade off women’s hard-earned equality in the weigh-off between gender and religion.

When a Toronto woman insisted that she be able to wear a niqab — the face-covering cloth donned by some particularly observant Muslim females — while testifying in court against the men she’d accused of sexually molesting her as a child — the case went all the way to Supreme Court of Canada. En route, “constructive compromises” tossed about — ultimately tossed out — included all-female courtrooms, judges and lawyers and courthouse staff; cross-examination only by a female lawyer; seclusion or screens for the witness, denying the defendants and their lawyers (or a jury that included men) an opportunity to see the accuser face-to-face and judge her mien, her truthfulness.

More Education stories on Thestar.com

Originally, I reluctantly supported the niqab wearer’s position, if only because it seemed the lesser evil — masked complainant versus the discouraging of victims to come forward because they would not show their faces. That was before I inadvertently discovered the identity of this “victim” and realized, belatedly, how we’d all been played. This wasn’t — at least in the specific case — about religious convictions, genuinely held. It was about politics — political Islam getting a foothold in Canadian courtrooms.

Of course, in a typically Canadian dénouement, the Supremes — in a split decision — ruled that the niqab should be neither banned outright nor routinely allowed but rather decided on a case-by-case basis.

I stress again that we don’t know the religion of Student Y. I don’t know and I don’t care. It hardly matters.

What I do know is that a human rights template carved out by pieties, exploiting the Canadian willingness to accommodate every Tom, Levi and Ahmed, shows how extensively society — but most especially the lah-dee-dah elitism, the condescending intellectualism, of Canadian universities — has fallen in obsequiousness to the forces of orthodoxy.

Indeed, they have become the orthodox.