Posted on 05/20/2002 8:19:58 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
The historians of a distant day will wrinkle their learned brows to try to account for the habits of our odd era. One seemingly innocuous noun — "diversity" — is going to take up a chunk of their explication.
An instructive case is that of Ron Brown, an assistant coach at the University of Nebraska who (briefly) was a candidate for the top football job at Stanford University — which fancies itself the Harvard of the West Coast, whatever one chooses to make of that. Brown is black. He also is — unfortunately, it would turn out — a professing Christian. More on that below.
One of those future scholars I expect to take up this case might find an analogy in the computer viruses of our day — the insidious spread of a destructive element that distorts the environment into which it is introduced. This historical chap, or chapess, will find that the diversity virus had its genesis on college campuses, a banner waved by the most active of the intellectual left and behind which bovine faculties duly marched.
The cause of this "diversity" was amplified enthusiastically by the media; it seeped and then flowed into the corporate world, initially to deflect criticism, eventually as a public-relations strategy and then as an institutional tenet.
Diversity in the viral context involved quotas (never called "quotas," to be sure) for enlisting and promoting members of minority groups in proportion to their percentage in the population. As "affirmative action" gradually was dulled as an instrument of perverted power, diversity was rushed into the game as a substitute. At its best-intentioned, this thrust was intended especially to compensate blacks for years of disadvantage — economic, educational and so forth.
As the triad of class/race/sex became ever more the norm of legitimacy among the dukes and duchesses of opinion, the criteria of who should be sheltered under the umbrella of diversity widened: Name what traditionally had been viewed as transgressive behavior (another favorite term of the banner-wavers) and it would be included in the favored lexicon. Mutations within the categories also were accorded status — if there wasn't actually a caucus of left-handed Aleut transvestite kleptomaniacs, it was an anomaly.
There were exceptions, to be sure, as group identity widened its sweep, and any college president who made a public utterance without obeisance to expansive diversity would find the incoming fire hot and heavy. White males, definitionally swine, of course, were anathema. As the affair of Ron Brown and Stanford dramatically illustrates, being a Christian could be a liability, too — the more so when homosexuality was not embraced as the fourth aspect of the Pauline urgings to faith, hope and charity. The resounding irony here, as noted, is that Brown not only is a Christian but black.
In the news account of this fiasco by the San Francisco Chronicle, it was not clear whether Brown's opinion of homosexuality was comparable to that of the Roman Catholic Church — that is, not condemning homosexuality but the practice of it. (This may seem to be logic chopping to the swift modern mind, but the distinction is a thoughtful one, the equivalent of making a fiery revolutionary speech as opposed to trying to blow up the Capitol building.)
To preside over the Stanford football program — as coaches prefer to call the professionalization of sport at high-octane schools — would be a prestigious coaching job, obviously. Brown was interviewed by sports bureaucrats at Palo Alto. A bit later, he wrote a column for the magazine of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in which he noted that a "top-20 college football program" — he never named Stanford — had not called him back for a final interview. Brown said the reason he was given was that it was not believed that "my Christian conviction would mesh well with that university."
This assertion was confirmed by Stanford's Alan Glenn, who labors under the heavy title of assistant athletic director for human resources. Or so he was quoted as saying to the Nebraska student newspaper. Not so, Glenn retorted before the ink was dry, and in the best tradition of flurried reaction when the sushi hits the fan, he complained that his comments had been taken out of context. His boss, Stanford Athletics Director Ted Leland, proclaimed in standard bureaucratese that "Religion played no role in our decisionmaking process."
Well, perhaps not. Brown might be forgiven if the thought crossed his mind that it had. It hardly is bulletin matter that, next to being opposed to abortion, opposition to the practice of homosexuality is a felony in liberal doctrine. And Brown already was on record for compounding the latter offense when on a radio program several years ago he scolded Christians for spurning homosexuals rather than showering them with love because, as a news story put it, love was needed "to win the homosexual to Christ."
Good heavens, so to speak. Can you imagine having a coach with such personal views influencing young minds at a place such as Stanford? That is the institution of higher custody where, a few years ago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson led a motley crew of students protesting a traditional course by chanting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho/ Western Civ has got to go." Looks as if it already has.
Woody West is an associate editor for Insight magazine.
Or an anti-Christian whine.
Well, it's the diversity THEY want, but their definition of diversity, is anyone who agrees with their ideology. It is nothing but left-speak.
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Or anti-Christian bigotry.
G-d forbid.
Ummmm .. waitaminute.
Just sell them at the next pogrom you come across.
By the way, does the coach himself ever claim he was a victim? The article obviously insinuates as much. Naturally, the double standard for Christians and conservatives is as glaring as ever.
Ron Brown is a good and decent man. He will be a head coach in the near future, and hopefully at a better program than Stanford's.
Couldn't have a decent Christian roast without your fatuous little sneer to lend color to the occasion.
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