If you read the pagan blogosphere you already have a fair idea as to what I'm talking about here.  If not, I suggest that you read the the material here, and here, and possibly here.  Once you've done that, you may read the formal statement from CAYA Coven regarding this matter.

What follows is based on a comment I made to a post at Erynn Laurie's Live Journal.  I owe her my thanks for having inspired me to finally get my thoughts in order on this.

I was very pleased to read Lady Yeshe Rabbit's apology for the problems surrounding the Lilith ritual at Pantheacon this year. It's been fairly obvious for several days (at least, it has been to me,) that the proximate cause of all of this turmoil was a failure in communication. We are human, and prone to error, and so these things do happen from time to time. Which is why we have things like Hanlon's Razor to remind us how to approach such matters.

Much of the asshattery in the pagan blogosphere about this incident is far less excusable.

Despite the genuine anguish and the impassioned rhetoric that has been generated by this incident, I continue to believe that there is nothing wrong with creating rituals or workshops at public gatherings where the intended audience is a limited subset of the membership of the gathering. The failure of the Amazon Priestess Tribe was NOT that they offered a ritual to which only women born as women were to be admitted. Rather, their failure, as Rabbit acknowledged in her apology, lay in not having clearly and unequivocally explained in advance who comprised their intended audience.

I won't presume to argue with any group which says it needs a private space in order to feel safe and secure in seeking a spiritual experience, whether it be a group of women born as women, or a group of gay men, or, for that matter, a group of left-handed Jewish jet pilots. Nor am I likely to feel deprived in any way by such a happening, because a ritual focused on the needs of a group to which I do not belong is unlikely to be of much benefit to me.

What has utterly appalled me in all this is the degree to which so many pagans who have been publicly commenting on this matter have presumed that one or more of the affected groups here was acting in bad faith or with malicious intent. It makes me wonder how much of this nebulous "pagan community" we talk about so often exists only in our minds. On the other hand, it says much that the public discussion of this matter that took place at Pantheacon on Monday was evidently conducted in a civil, respectful, and responsible manner, despite the high levels of emotion being experienced by all who were present.

Hopefully, we will all learn from this, and do better in the future.