Before York University’s bizarre flirtation with gender segregation went viral, it had a long incubation period in this province.

Despite past pretensions to moral superiority, Ontario has never been immune to Quebec’s pathological obsession with religion and reasonable accommodation. We, too, are tangled up in social tensions that pit piety against equity and political correctness against common sense and common law.

After years of looking down on Quebec’s undignified debates, it turns out that Ontarians need to learn lessons of their own in how to defend their social values against religious virtues of dubious provenance.

A York student’s refusal to interact with female classmates, purportedly on religious grounds, was galling enough. Truly appalling, however, was the conduct of the grown-ups on campus — the senior administrators and compliant lawyers who took the student’s side against his teacher.

Sociology professor Paul Grayson gave his class a real-life lesson in the humanities. By sticking up for female students and sticking it to his superiors, he struck a chord with the public.

But the story isn’t over yet. Ontarians were perhaps too absorbed in the absurdity of this tale to note its exquisitely ironic timing:

York University’s debacle coincided with the debut of public hearings in Quebec this month on its controversial values charter. Quebecers could chuckle as once-smug Ontarians grew apoplectic over “unreasonable” accommodations of their own.

Another little-noticed milestone took place last week in Toronto: A Muslim woman, who five years ago famously refused to remove the niqab (veiling all but her eyes) when testifying in a sexual assault trial, was back in court. The complainant had made legal history when she appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which sent the case back with new conditions safeguarding the right of the accused to face his accuser. The trial judge once again insisted she remove the face veil, and this time she quietly agreed (spectators had to leave).

The female complainant in court and the male student on campus were both converts who adhered to questionably rigid views of their adopted faiths. While we don’t know the religion of the unidentified York student, both Muslim and Jewish experts told the professor there were no compelling reasons to shun female classmates.

Yet prominent jurists keep insisting we have no right to question whether an individual’s fringe views are “sincerely held.” Such high-minded restraint only indulges dubiously low benchmarks that leave us bending to every caprice, custom, culture or cult.

When people learned that the female complainant routinely removed her niqab while driving, it made a mockery of her demands. When the York student later complied with the professor of his own volition (despite gaining an exemption from the administration), it suggested his religious claims were situational and optional.

And perennial. Montrealers were puzzled several years ago when a local gym frosted its windows to avoid offending ultra-orthodox Jews walking by on the Sabbath. Couldn’t the men avoid temptation by turning their heads away from the women in leotards, rather than leering through the windows? That’s how it worked when I was posted to Jerusalem in the 1990s: pious Jews in black garb walked by a local salsa bar despite the dancers gyrating in full view — and no one said boo. In Canada we can be more Catholic than the pope and more Jewish than the Jews of Jerusalem.

That’s not to say we should disdain religious accommodation. Just that there are reasonable limits.

Allowing observant Sikhs to wear a turban instead of a police cap takes nothing away from us. But when a Sikh man refused to wear a motorcycle helmet on religious grounds, the courts wisely rejected his arguments, lest our health-care system be billed for his brain damage if he crashed without protection.

We tolerate Catholic prohibitions against women priests within their own private church precincts. But we draw the line at discrimination against women and gays in our publicly funded school hallways.

Many Ontarians (and most Montrealers) are quite rightly mortified by the Parti Québécois government’s pandering to prejudices. Banning religious symbols for public servants (veil, turban or kippa) would be an invasive measure, depriving religious people of symbols that harm no one.

If the pendulum of public opinion has swung too far in Quebec, we need to ask ourselves why — and how it could happen here. For we are not immune to backlashes.

When the authorities align themselves with outliers who would superimpose their extreme religious views on other people’s entrenched legal rights — undermining the status of an accused in court or a female on campus — it fails the common sense smell test.

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To this day, officials at York cling to their muddled thinking, rationalizing and over-intellectualizing their thought processes without thinking through the consequences. They not only let down their female students, they undermined public confidence, the sine qua non of non-discrimination.

They are their own worst enemies. By indulging tenuous claims on matters of religious faith, they undermine public faith in the ethic of tolerance.

Martin Regg Cohn’s provincial affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn

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