A couple of weeks ago on a long motorway drive I found myself listening to Clare Balding's Desert Island Discs. Why, Kirsty Young wanted to know, did Ms Balding decline to take part in coverage of the Open Golf championship at Muirfield, a club which refuses entry to women, whereas she was willing to go to the Winter Olympics in Russia, a country whose government is notoriously homophobic?
Balding's answer, that in the UK her stance had some resonance whereas in Russia no-one knew or cared who she was, seemed reasonable enough, and I forgot about it until the hoo-hah last week over the debate at University College London. You may remember that UCL is in trouble for hosting a Muslim-organised debate where audience members were offered mixed or segregated seating.
Like most small "l" liberals I incline to the view that people should be able to do more or less what they like where possible, and as someone with religious sympathies if not actual religious beliefs that view extends to the practice of religion. However where religious rights and other rights clash there's an ambigous middle ground that I suspect we will see increasingly fought over.
If you are inclined towards an absolutist take on religious freedom, consider the practice of compulsory female circumcision, a manifestation of religious belief in action. Still think people should always be able to do what they like? No, nor me.
In reality our willingness to tolerate other people's religious practices is not absolute, but depends on the extent to which those practices differ from our own. Someone who thinks segregating a meeting is OK might not mind too much compulsory clitoridectomy; someone who finds segregation an affront to feminism is going to be horrified by it.
UCL seem to have followed the policy arrived at by Universities UK - namely that segregation is OK if it's voluntary and if there's a third area of mixed seating. Subsequently UUK now seem to have withdrawn this policy in the face of criticism from David Cameron and Michael Gove. Lord knows what they are going to replace it with.
Areas where potential rights conflict, in this case female equality versus religious freedom, are probably not subject to being forensically unpicked: at root politics is about power, and about imposing your vision of society on others. We haven't tried to accommodate those North African Muslims who practice female circumcision: we think it's wrong, so they can't do it legally. The UK government has essentially imposed its views on them.
Unlike Clare Balding, I personally don't think there's much wrong with Muirfield golf club having a men-only membership. It's a private organisation; other golf clubs are available. I as a man am free to take my maximum-handicap hacking elsewhere if I choose. Nor would I mind a private Mosque having segregated prayers, if that's what its members want.
(Don't ask me why a men-only golf club is just about OK, but a whites-only one wouldn't be; let's stick to the topic)
A university on the other hand is, whatever the niceties of ownership, essentially a public institution. If it wants to ban segregated meetings it should be able to do so. Muslims are free to campaign against it and it's up to them to see if they can prevail.
As for Ms Balding, three quarters of an hour in her radio company was quite enough. I couldn't quite put my finger on what I disliked about her. And no, it wasn't that she was a lesbian. I realised afterwards it was that she was a female version of a male type I have always envied and disliked - the Jock. Cheerful, unreflective, competitive and enthusiastic, she played a series of quite dreadful records.
Lastly, a mention for the Inclusive Mosque Initiative, an organisation which is trying, in the face of some resistance, to promote what are effectively unisex mosques. I have always thought that for the UK to come to an unacknowledged truce with Muslims a British version of Islam would have to emerge, and this is an enormously encouraging sign.
