When the Equality Authority took Portmarnock Golf Club to court over its refusal to allow women to become full members, the club defended its position on the grounds that banning women was an example of "diversity" and should therefore be applauded.
It is a clever argument, and a good example of the way liberals sometimes tie themselves in knots. Good liberal principles - diversity, tolerance, pluralism, multi-culturalism - can be used to defend the most obnoxiously reactionary positions. When difference is seen as a value in itself, the basic point - human equality - gets lost in the haze of vapid tolerance.
I thought of Portmarnock Golf Club last weekend when a few hundred demonstrators, under the aegis of the Irish Anti-War Movement, descended on the French Embassy to protest at the French government's proposals to ban religious symbols, and in particular the Islamic headscarf, from public schools. Posters for the protest demanded that France "Stop the War on Muslims". The Green Party MEP, Ms Patricia McKenna, described the proposed law as "a gross breach of human rights".
Behind this outrage lies an apparently impeccable set of perceptions. People have different cultural and religious traditions and a liberal society must respect these diverse values. Islam is an established part of European culture and its followers have a right to express their faith without hindrance. Only a racist, a bigot or a xenophobe could object to a young Muslim woman going to school in the attire that her religion requires. And even if it is true that the French law is actually non-discriminatory in that it bans all overtly religious garb - including the wearing of large crucifixes or Jewish skull-caps - this, according to the protesters, is simply a cover for anti-Islamic prejudice.
It seems to me, though, that the protesters are wrong, and that they expose the dangers of a kind of multicultural ideology that is in fact a recipe for ghettoisation. There is a real danger that, in the name of tolerance, we end up validating ersatz traditions that use religion as an excuse for oppression. By taking the teachings of a conservative elite as the essence of Islam, we practice a kind of tolerant bigotry, denying to Islam the complexity and contradiction that we acknowledge in, for example, Christianity.
Patricia McKenna told the protest meeting, for example, that "unlike Christians, Muslims have a specific dress code". This is quite simply untrue. There is nothing specific about Islamic dress codes. Islam has no fixed standard as to the style of dress or type of clothing that Muslims must wear. The only references to women's clothing in the Koran are vague. One is an injunction to "tell your wives and daughters and the believing women to draw their outer garments around them".
The other is an instruction to Islamic women "that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what must ordinarily appear thereof". The only clear requirement is modesty - a concept that is innately variable according to the cultural norms of a particular period and society.
Even conservative Islamic clerics don't agree about what kind of dress is demanded by their faith. The covering of the hair by a tight headscarf - the practice being defended by the weekend's protesters - is regarded by some clerical authorities as grossly inadequate. They claim that complete coverage even of the face and hands is required. One Saudi Arabian Islamic scholar has recently argued that the teaching of Islam permits women only to show a half of one eye in public.
Which raises a key question of those who, in the name of liberalism and human rights, regard it as an outrage that public schools be preserved as places where children enter, not as members of a "culture" but as equal human beings. If the headscarf is okay, what about the full yashmak? And if the yashmak is okay, what about the practice that a minority of Muslims regard as a related requirement of female modesty - the circumcision of the clitoris?
What about those patriarchal extremists who believe that educating girls in the first place is against the will of Allah? Is it a "gross breach of human rights" to insist that these girls have a right to go to school?
The irony of using the language of human rights to defend what are in fact patriarchal traditions with no real roots in religion is evident in Lara Marlowe's report on the weekend's demonstrations in Paris, of which the Dublin protest was an offshoot: "The Paris march was led by men, who several times stopped reporters from speaking to the veiled and unveiled women who walked behind them." While Patricia McKenna was talking at the Dublin protest of "free speech and democracy" many of those who were metaphorically marching alongside her in Paris would see her own outspokenness as a brazen sign of a decadent society. We know enough in this country about the abuse of religious language to justify the naked exercise of power not to feel in any way superior to any other culture. But we should also know enough not to allow a spurious notion of "diversity" to undermine the far more basic need for equality.