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Liberals' idea of diversity is people who look different but sound identical

The point here is that liberals deflect the gibe that their idea of diversity is people who look different but sound identical by insisting, as our prime minister just did in a New York University commencement address, that “Our celebration of difference needs to extend to differences of values and belief.” But there is a word for people who say one thing and do another. And it is not “diverse.”

At NYU, Trudeau denounced tribalism in various forms, from church attendance to gun ownership to, yes, being “pro-choice.” Yet his government infamously refuses summer job grant money to organizations not willing to endorse abortion in principle even if the specific application is unrelated to pro-life activism. Likewise the Times seems to feel no nostalgia whatsoever about Ireland becoming more like everywhere else, surely a loss of diversity even if justified in the name of social justice.

A few years back I encountered a book on Ireland published by the European Union (slogan “United in Diversity”) that shoved the shamrocks and leprechauns onto the rubbish heap of history and praised its cosmopolitan multicultural … being just like everywhere else. Eight times as many Polish as Gaelic speakers, the book gloated. The Galactic Metropolis. No Irish there there. And, by implication, good riddance to all that diversity muck.

Photo by Peter Morrison/AP

Following the referendum, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said opponents may feel that Ireland “is no longer a country you recognize. I would like to reassure you that Ireland is still the same country today as it was before, just a little more tolerant, open and respectful.” But in what sense is it “the same?” And was anything of value lost on what Varadkar called “‘the day Ireland stepped out from under the last of our shadows?”