Why the outrage over Hooters and Page 3 when our established church is still practising discrimination?
Maybe it's a bit greedy, in the week that Bristol saw off Hooters 'breastaurant' and Mark Thompson announced that he was quite near to getting over his thing about middle-aged women and the prime minister, showing equal courage, went all the way to Sweden to meet some actual feminists, they being as rare around these parts as the fabled yeti, to ask for anything more.
Maybe it should be enough that Borgen came along, that Downing Street is searching tirelessly for that holiest of grails, a woman-expert, that Newsnight is suddenly featuring ladies by the yard, not neglecting to add the surgically improved Katie Price to its trusty supply of Louise Mensch, thus setting a fine example to the Sun's Page 3. According to its editor, speaking at the Leveson inquiry, the aim of this institution is to "celebrate natural beauty" and artificially enhanced breasts are, on principle, prohibited. Is nowhere, you sometimes wonder, free of wilful discrimination?
Even at the Sun, says the editor, Dominic Mohan, there have been improvements, in the shape of Germaine Greer granting Page 3 her personal pardon – on the basis, if he has this right, that her odd-job man says: "It cheers me up." Snap! If only Clare Short had taken the trouble to ask hers. Moreover, as he pointed out, Page 3 is not illegal, practically nothing compared to, you know, that awful stuff on the internet and is the starting point for some excellent, fully-clothed careers. "A lot of Page 3 girls," said Mr Mohan, "they're much more than models. They've become ambassadors for the paper."
A pity, in case the Foreign Office was interested, they did not consider sending one to the Leveson inquiry, where Mohan was cutting, in the eyes of some spectators, a decidedly repulsive figure. "A number of them have travelled to Afghanistan," Mohan doggedly continued, in defence of his half-naked diplomats. "Some have gone into careers in photography." So it is not, surely, unthinkable that one of these young talents might end up as successful as Mr Mohan or Rebekah Brooks, editing the Sun.
By coincidence, as Mr Mohan discoursed, uncheerfully, on the Sun's contribution to the onward march of feminism, Archbishops Williams and Sentamu were also discussing equal opportunities for women within a church that still can't bring itself to allow them the top jobs. Last week, after the synod saw off his favoured ruse, for making women second-class bishops, Williams still reserved the right to, as he put it, subject the legislation that would introduce women bishops to some unspecified "fine-tuning" by the House of Bishops, the – obviously – all-male group that will supervise the next step on the agonising journey towards equality.
What will he come up with, to ensure that the anti-women campaigners do not feel in any way that secular feminism has won the day? Has he thought of insisting, as with the gay vicar solution, of permitting women bishops if they cease having a full female life, eg, by promising never to cry or to turn up the heating and to forswear all contact with the Daily Mail website? At any rate, both reformers and traditionalists sound profoundly suspicious.
Like the Sun, Williams's church has struggled to figure out an appropriate role for women, enduring, in recent years, the jeers of outsiders who seem determined to ignore the full context and dispensations pertaining to its particular culture. But at least the Sun can claim, via Mohan, that women can move on, if the Faustian pact appeals, to be "much more than models". Within the church, women have been stuck, since 1992, with a system that stops women, although they can be priests, from joining the episcopate.
Of course, if Anglicanism were not the established church, the view of non-members on its unequal opportunities would be about as relevant as Richard Dawkins's take on literal transubstantiation.
As it is, so long as discrimination continues within the Anglican church, its 26 reserved places in the legislature, in which bishops have recently cut such a dash, remain also the exclusive property of men. Men who, in some cases, consider it their duty to protect the church from ignorant "secular attacks". The Bishop of Manchester, for instance, has regretted "discrimination" suffered by Christians who feel like "outcasts in their own land".
Mercifully for the outcasts, however, the House of Lords' row of all-male bottoms forms so familiar a part of the constitutional landscape that the absurdity of this arrangement in a country with vigorously enforced anti-discrimination laws is, most of the time, overlooked. So much so that it does not occur to, say, Sentamu, to deal with the institutionally sexist mote in his own eye, before speaking out against institutional racism or health legislation for which, he protests, there is no mandate: "Joe and Jane Public did not vote on it."
What next for indignant Sentamu, often tipped as the ideal successor to Archbishop Williams? The maleness of the Today programme? A similar bravado informed a speech to the select committee on Lords reform by Williams, in which he argued the case for bishops in a reformed chamber, given his church's conviction that all its members "should have a full understanding of the diversity of civil society".
At last week's synod, yet more lord bishops extolled their lively political role as a "key voice" for equality, the poor and the common good. That would be those parts of the common good, presumably, that share the church's distaste for equality of the sexes, for majority support for assisted dying and for the equal provision of civic rites, given Archbishop of York's insistence that "marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman". The state, he says, has no business imposing a contrary view that is, to judge by civil partnerships, now widely accepted in the population he is, as a state churchman, supposed to serve – and not least via 5,000 Anglican schools.
Whether it is because of Sentamu's allegedly charismatic ubiquity or the British tradition of incredibly annoying bishops, his church escaped lightly from this episode.
His insulting remarks have been less ridiculed than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that guides, at some distance, Mitt Romney, with its bonkers underwear, woeful history of polygamy, men-only priests and – get this for creepy hilariousness – insistence that "marriage should be recognised as only between a man and a woman". Not to mention other weirdnesses raised in a New York Times debate called "What is it About Mormons?", in which one contributor expressed her disquiet that "male dominance is the essence of the faith".
Perhaps Romney should direct anxious secularists to a London synod. Here, the US fact-finders would discover, bishops would never advocate eccentric underwear in the manner of Mormon elders. On the other hand they believe a lot of the same old stuff and, for that very reason, they get to be in politics, with even more influence than Hooters.