Thank you to Sara Maitland for her consideration (14 March) of the implications of “complementarity”. She reminds us of the fallacy of “special pleading” which relies on a type of argument in one context which would be eschewed in another. Proponents of such an approach don’t tend to “do” irony. “Separate but equal” alluded to in the article provided the doctrine deployed to support racial segregation in the USA and was opposed by Martin Luther King Jr and his fellow Baptist ministers supported by their organisation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the early 1960s activist university students, however, decided to set up their own Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee to be free of a centralised and patriarchical