And More's The Pity

"I felt degraded, discriminated against. I felt like a woman in the 1950s. We wouldn't allow someone using their religion to discriminate against someone's race, so why would they use it to discriminate against somebody's gender?"
"[The school's sensei, or teacher] would put all the women on one side and then offer a side for the Muslim man so there wouldn't be any problems. He would shake hands with all the other men in the dojo, but he wouldn't even come over and look at the women ... he just ignored us."
"I thought why would someone's religion -- something that they choose to follow -- trump my gender, which is something that I was born with?"
Sonja Power, 17, Halifax, Nova Scotia

"I believe every person should have an equal opportunity to participate in recreational activities and I would not deny this student access to my classes. [Accommodation was made with the confidence it would not be] disadvantaging any other person's participation my classes."
Steve Nickerson, owner/sensei of East Coast Yoshinkan Aikido

Sonja Power who lives in the Halifax suburb of Upper Tantallon had been a student at East Coast Yoshinkan since she was six years old. When she was 15, close to earning her aikido black belt, a man enrolled at the school. The man informed the owner that he was not permitted physical contact with women in observance of his Islamic faith. Suddenly, said Ms. Power, the sessions at the school were divided by gender.

Ms. Power and her mother spoke to the sensei voicing her concerns about the new environment that prevailed at the school turning it from a free and open equal relationship between the genders to a closed one, partitioning the women from the men. The response was that it was the right of the student. "[The sensei] told us to get used to it", said Michele Walsh, Sonja's mother. Sonja toughed it out at the school for another five months.

It was when the male student began handing out unsolicited copies of a booklet authored by a Toronto Islamic writer by the name of Suhail Kapoor with the title "Islam; From darkness to light", that she decided it was time to part with the school. Some passages in the booklet particularly troubled her: "[When] a woman chooses to show her body in one form or another, the message is only one: she wants attention and possibly much more".

As far as Steve Nickerson, the owner of the East Coast Yoshinkan Aikido is concerned, he made the right decision. One that was supported both by the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission and the municipality which operates Lakeside Community Centre out of which the East Coast Yoshinkan Aikido operates.

"If it doesn't cost us to the point of undue hardship, then we need to try to ... support them, and not have them feel persecuted for their deeply held belief", cautioned Lisa Teryl, a lawyer for the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, responding in a general manner to the issue of accommodation, not specifically related to the aikido instance.

"The exercise of human rights by some individuals can come into conflict with human rights entitlements of others", acknowledged Halifax recreational co-ordinator Peter Jollimore. "[But] often, such conflicts can be resolved by simple dialogue between the affected parties."

In this case, as in so many others, perhaps the gross majority of such cases, the simple conversation results between the affected and the go-between with the decision squarely in favour of an offender of someone else's equality rights.