Aspects of diversity worth comment:
- As a serious problem that’s making us tie ourselves into knots, terrorism in the West is a matter of Muslims and immigrants. In response, people have been all too willing to discuss legalizing torture, abolishing civil liberties for everyone, attacking “fundamentalism” (the belief revelation can tell us things New York Times editorials can’t), and conquering the Muslim world to straighten them all out. They’ve been entirely unwilling to discuss cutting back on immigration and being much choosier about who you let in. Does that make any sense at all?
- Every political community needs common commitments to exist at all. Since a political community must claim the right to override personal interests even in cases of life and death it must ascribe an ultimately compelling quality to the common commitments on which it is based. So what does a political community do that claims to be “multicultural”—to have no commitments other than equal respect for commitments? It makes having no substantive commitments the supreme commitment that trumps everything else. Moral nihilism becomes enforceable by law. Thus, in Australia various institutes and unions are shocked that Catholic schools are allowed to engage in “discrimination” by expelling students who engage in sexual misconduct, and want “the exemption to be removed to bring private schools in line with the values of the general community.” Free to be you and me, it turns out, means that everything has to be the same.
It is worth noting that “the
It is worth noting that “the values of the general community” are often very different from what these reformers have in mind.
What they really mean is that private schools should be cowed by the “tolerance” activists to the same extent public schools are.
And so the next phase begins. These totalitarians never really intended to leave any room for religion, even as a matter of private association.
How long, I wonder, will it be before some activist judge rules that the US bishops may not legally deny communion to politicians and parishioners who vote to preserve “a woman’s right to choose”?