John Blasiak’s recent My Turn piece asking, “Do we really value diversity?” creates a ridiculous false dichotomy that doesn’t stand up to even modest scrutiny.
There is no reason to believe that we are required to choose between, “patriarchy, capitalism, the Bible and English Common Law,” on the one hand and, “arranged marriages, blood feuds, honor killings and systemic nepotism,” on the other. Mr. Blasiak relies on vagaries about what “many cultures” believe and do to artificially raise supposed necessity of the status quo.
Can Mr. Blasiak point to instances of cultural groups residing in the U.S. advocating for the legalization of honor killings? Can he point to any statistics suggesting that employees from other cultures “come in only when they want to and then simply walk away” at a greater rate than people Mr. Blasiak would consider “American?” Does Mr. Blasiak actually believe that “slaughter(ing) a goat in (one’s) driveway” is the equivalent of not mowing the lawn?
One has to wonder how many of the freedoms we now enjoy, and which Mr. Blasiak implies we owe to “Christian white men with guns,” were met with the same sort of bad-faith hand wringing about how they would, “produce only disruption instead of progress,” by writers committed to preserving the status-quo. The early histories of slavery abolition, universal suffrage, and modern labor protections are filled with activists who were smeared that way, until their supposedly fringe beliefs became mainstream and credit for their accomplishments was stolen by the same establishment that tried to crush their movements.
There is no reason to think that celebrating and encouraging genuine cultural diversity requires us to check our moral convictions at the door. It is, in fact, the only ethical option we have.
Brian Snell
Greenfield