Jim Fitzpatrick MP has attended many Muslim weddings. He caused a fuss recently when he and his wife as far as I know politely walked out of one at which men and women were segregated; he then used the media to make some political points about radicalisation among Muslims.

(Update: picking up a helpful comment below, I do not mean to accuse Mr Fitzpatrick of deliberately ‘using the media’ to get his account of this event publicised. From the reports I have seen it is not clear to me whether he did this, or whether media outlets separately got the story and then he responded to them as he did. Or indeed whether he responded to a press enquiry and then saw an opportunity to crank up more widespread coverage. Many possibilities!)

An interesting issue of politics colliding with etiquette. He has been attacked from all sides.

Such as Archbishop Cranmer:

Where is the courtesy, the grace, the humility, the respect for the fact that this was somebody else’s day? The arrangements were the personal choice of the bride and groom. How they chose to seat people and conduct their wedding was entirely up to them.

But Jim Fitzpatrick has succeeded in turning the biggest and happiest day of their lives into a PR stunt and an anti-Muslim media fest…

The problem, Mr Fitzpatrick, is that your party has mistaken social cohesion for multiculturalism. You have destroyed community cohesion by pandering to the whims of every minority and creating a hierarchy of rights in which each and every disparate group now vies for supremacy. There can be no cohesion where there is no harmony, and no harmony in a climate of perpetual struggle for supreme rights.

But Mr Fitzpatrick declares defiantly: "I’m not pandering to any minority opinion.”

Labour’s raison d’être of the past decade has been to pander to every minority opinion – and principally that of Muslims and homosexuals. Jim Fitzpatrick is either a fool or a liar.

And from the activist Left, Random Blowe:

… the way Fitzpatrick has reacted has been particularly boorish and insulting. This was a private function; the bride and groom, Bodrul Islam and Mahbuba Kamali, chose how they wanted their ceremony conducted and as a guest, Fitzpatrick should have either accepted this out of courtesy, even if he didn’t agree with it, or left discreetly and without fuss.

What he most certainly shouldn’t have done is use the ceremony’s rituals to launch into an attack in the East London Advertiser on the Jamaatis that run the LMC and the newly-married couple caught up in this are quite right to feel aggrieved that their wedding day has been “hijacked for political gain”.

As one comment on The Daily (Maybe) said, it would have been different if the event had been a political meeting. The social conservatism that lies behind customs such as gender segregation is undoubtedly shared by a number orthodox religious traditions and this often throws up some important dilemmas for those on the Left who campaign in areas where religious belief is strong.

How far should courtesy extend towards individual religious and cultural practices, or to religious-based organisations for that matter, before this starts to clash with our own values?

Mrs Crawf and I faced something like this at least twice in our diplomatic careers as I recall.

In Sarajevo we were introduced at a reception to Yusuf Islam, viz former singer Cat Stevens. He politely shook my hand but did not shake my wife’s, as Muslims of a certain persuasion do not do that sort of thing.

Lofty religious principles? Or rude/obnoxious?

Before that in South Africa we were invited to dinner at the home of a senior lawyer from the Black Lawyers Association. He was a prosperous Zulu living in a smart house in a smart African area.

Imagine our surprise when we sat down for dinner and it turned out that his wife was not permitted to join us – she had to serve the food from the kitchen as per Zulu tradition. I have to say that it did not occur to us to walk out in protest at this (for us) startling sexism in what otherwise looked like a typical African upwardly mobile modern household.

What’s odd about this Fitzpatrick episode is the implicit assumption by his critics that he has to ‘respect’ the cultural traditions of the hosts, but that his own cultural traditions somehow count less.

If he and his wife are uncomfortable at events involving gender segregation, why should they be expected to stay at them? If they think that parts of our society are getting more reactionary in their attitudes to women, should they not say so?

The answer perhaps lies with the sort of argument used by Archbishop Cranmer. NuLabour have created and supported (and paid for via all sorts of taxpayers subsidies) various defaults in favour of certain forms of ‘tolerance’ but not others.

In particular it has become fair game in progressive tendencies to berate conservative Western religious views eg on homosexuality/women, but champion non-Western proponents of far more extreme and violent positions.

At one point in Warsaw liberal European opinion was muttering about the reactionary social and allegedly antisemitic views of the Polish Families party who were for a while in a coalition government with Law and Justice. I noted that the FCO had been congratulating itself lavishly on an event in Turkey featuring ‘dialogue’ with various radical Muslims whose reported positions on homosexuality/women/Jews were beyond vile.

So I sent an email to London asking whether we now had a policy of flatly opposing white-skinned European antisemitic homophobes, but extending the hand of dialogue to brown-skinned Asian antisemitic homophobes.

No answer.