When a member of Google’s overwhelmingly white, male engineering staff raised questions about the company’s plan to increase representation of women and non-Asian minorities on the engineering staff, his politically incorrect words grabbed national attention. The tech giant’s new chief diversity officer responded in the worst way. Shut up, she said in so many words.

Oh sure, Danielle Brown — the vice president of diversity, integrity and governance — used some of the right words in responding to the internal memo. “Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions,” she wrote in her reply.

But exactly how comfortable should those dissenters feel? Not at all. “I found that (the memo) advanced incorrect assumptions about gender," Brown wrote. "I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.”

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The ideas in the politely worded memo, which endorses the need for diversity and merely disagrees on how best to pursue it, are so toxic in Brown’s view that it would be wrong to even allow one employee to be involuntarily exposed to them. So much for having a discussion.

Indeed, Brown's statement proves at least one part of the anonymous Google engineer’s memo to be perfectly accurate. “In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility,” the memo states.

Fear of exposing yourself to “open hostility” will be familiar to conservatives and even right-leaning moderates who have worked nearly anywhere in academia, in Hollywood and in too much of the news media.

And open hostility is exactly what Brown signaled in arguing that the memo writer’s words did not “work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies and anti-discrimination laws.”

The message to white engineers and anyone who agrees with them is that somehow expressing the wrong ideas violates the rules of working at Google and maybe even the law.

This is a problem of far wider significance than Silicon Valley. We’re losing our ability to talk about sex, sexuality, race and diversity of all kinds nationwide. Part of the reason we have Donald Trump as president is that so many people with the "wrong" ideas have been told to be quiet for so long, and they’re not having it anymore.

Google’s anonymous memo writer puts his finger on what is going on. We’ve turned diversity into a religious dogma that shall not be questioned. Moral good people believe in diversity and are united in how to pursue it. Anyone who disagrees with the consensus, even a little, is evil.

“As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the ‘victims,’ " the memo states.

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He’s right, and it is a stupid way for a company or a country to pursue a goal that is so important.

Here’s an idea for Google’s diversity chief and anyone else who cares about how Americans grope our way into an increasingly diverse future: In the future, there are still going to be heterosexual white guys. If you want us to listen and change our ways to be more welcoming of women and non-Asian minorities, then you are going to need to listen, too.

If you stop telling people who disagree with you to pipe down, you might find that you also have some “incorrect assumptions” in need of adjustment. When we all make some adjustments, we might find a way to work this out.

David Mastio is the deputy Editorial Page editor of USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter @DavidMastio.

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