A female ex-Mountie is suing the force because the appalling sexual harassment she says she suffered while serving on the Red Deer detachment forced her to resign.

How valid are her charges the court, of course, must decide. The RCMP deny them. But if they are even partly true it raises a question: Why would men behave in this way?

She says that male officers played porno movies in her presence, flashed Playboy centrefolds at her, that one man kissed her, that men wouldn't respond quickly when she called for backup, and when she herself answered such calls they sometimes told her to go get lost. One day she found a pair of plastic breasts taped to her desk.

She used to fill out her reports while sitting weeping in the car, she said, because she could not stand being with those men. Eventually, dissolved in tears, she quit. Now she wants $850,000 in damages.

The point is that such behavior is not characteristic of males in any working environment I've encountered, and certainly doesn't seem characteristic of anything I've ever heard or seen of the RCMP. So if this is now happening, you have to wonder why.

I think I know the answer.

Those who rule our society - meaning the bureaucrats, the lobby groups and the liberal media - have imposed upon us certain dogmas that must be accepted as morally unchallengeable. One of them is that men and women are equally able to do any job. There must be no gender discrimination in hiring.

That's why we have female members of the RCMP, female firefighters, female front-line soldiers, male nurses, male kindergarten teachers and house- husbands.

Now I do not deny that an unusual woman might make a fine constable in the RCMP, or would be big and strapping enough to be a firefighter.

Nor would I deny that an unusual man might make an ideal nurse, or a competent kindergarten teacher, and an extremely unusual man, a half-competent house-husband.

But the emphasis is always on the word "unusual". They are the exception. And the whole point of these new, socially ennobling employment policies is that such cases must not be considered exceptional but the norm. There must be no gender bias in hiring people to fill these positions.

And that, for two reasons, is total nonsense.

First, the two sexes are not the same, physically or psychologically, and some jobs require characteristics that are far more likely to occur in one sex than the other. A certain gentle concern and understanding is essential in a kindergarten teacher, and women are far more likely to have that than men.

A certain robust size and strength is essential in a fireman, and men are far more likely to have that than women.

Government policies aimed at achieving "equality of gender," therefore, are arguing with nature, and you cannot repeal the laws of nature.

Second, it has been the experience of the ages that certain kinds of work are best done in a certain group atmosphere.

It is no accident that from the Roman legions to the Coldstream Guards, soldiers have always performed best when they were controlled by, and embraced, an iron code of discipline which is, a very macho, masculine thing.

Add one female to that mix and everything falls apart. It isn't her fault. It's just the way things are.

Police forces, I suspect, may be the same. Certainly the early history of the North-West Mounted Police evidences this. For years, Mounties were not even allowed to marry until they had served a certain number of years on the force. Now if things went wrong at Red Deer, then this, perhaps is the explanation.

Is it not time that we told our social planners to keep these experimentations in the creation of their concept of an ideal society out of the workaday world? What matters in a police force is whether it can control crime, and what matters in a fire department is whether it can put out fires.

The genders of the policemen and firemen do not matter, and that means, apart from very unusual instances, they will nearly always be male.

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