Fwiw, I don't think pk is bigotted, but nor do I think he is trolling exactly. I disagree with quite a bit of what he's said, but in part, it seems to me that he's been playing devil's advocate not for its own sake, but in an attempt to provoke good counterarguments.
For my part, while I have no desire for the state to tell people how to live, I have come to the conclusion that it is the state's proper role as lawgiver to provide a framework of dos and do nots within which everyone has to remain. Without such limitations, there is merely the tyranny of the strongest, not any kind of freedom.
In order to do that effectively, the UK state needs to reinvent itself. Not in any revolutionary way, but in a way that will not affect the lives of most people at all. Constitutional reform is vital if we are to have a clear-headed view of how to deal with issues such as women's rights within minority groups. The only way to do that, imo, is with a written constitution that forms the highest law of the land. In order for that to happen, first the state needs to fully secularise, removing the established church.
This constitution would, among other things, lay out explicitly the ways that it would be illegal to discriminate – on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or religious belief as the fundamental four categories, allowing very carefully worded exceptions: where you can provide a specific reason for your discrimination, for instance you need a woman to work at a women's refuge, etc. Crucially, these would form the highest law and in return for the inclusion of religious belief in the protected categories, religious groups would not receive any kind of exception to those categories.
A constitution is always a compromise, and that would be the compromise I would offer religious leaders: receive legal protection for your religion and its followers in return for accepting the full equality of others regardless of their race, gender or sexual orientation.
This could be painful for certain religious groups to accept. Tough. That pain would only be caused by the fact that they currently do discriminate. Those of us with a firm conviction of the rightness of such universal legal protection need to stand firm.
