Catholic Bishop Robert Barron said the community’s love for the “excellence” in sport demonstrated at this year’s Olympics goes hand-in-hand with ongoing efforts to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and other efforts to ensure people have equal outcomes in life rather than equal opportunities. contrary to the concerns.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, the bishop of the Winona-Rochester Diocese of Minnesota and a prominent Catholic influencer used the example of elite Olympic gymnast Simone Biles to illustrate the folly of DEI. He explained that her talent came about because she beat other athletes to become the best. In other words, she excluded people who were not a good fit for her sport.
“Well, that’s not only unfair, but it undermines the excellence of what we’re celebrating,” Barron told Fox about how forcing equality of outcomes goes against what people work so hard to cheer for at the Olympics.
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Bishop Robert Barron explained to Fox News Digital how the pursuit of athletic excellence is at odds with society’s pursuit of diversity quotas. (Fox News Digital)
Bishop Barron said there was a “tension” between athletic performance and so-called fairness.
“I don’t think you can have both of those things at the same time,” he said, noting that there is an important distinction between fairness of outcome and “equality of opportunity.”
He made this point in terms of the record-breaking gymnast he calls “the greatest of all time”: “Suppose at some point in Simone Biles’ career, someone told her, ‘No. , no, you can’t go and be excluded from a gymnastics team because you’re black or because you’re a woman or whatever, and of course that’s not fair at any time, at any level.
He continued, “Well, equal opportunity. But fairness of outcome, which our society seems to take very seriously now; so the outcome of a situation or a particular industry should be consistent with, say, the racial collapse of society and so on.”
Bishop Barron claims that the latter framework is unjust. He then went on to describe how Biles has achieved a higher athletic standard in her field than almost anyone else on the planet, which is contrary to that and deserves praise.
“She stands at the pinnacle of Olympic excellence because, throughout her lifetime, large swaths of people were excluded. Now I mean, it’s not that they didn’t get equal opportunity. I mean, well, she won one. medal, meaning that no one else she competed with received a medal.
“She put together team after team, which meant that all the other people who played for the team were left out,” he added.
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Bishop Robert Barron describes how Olympian Simone Biles’ pursuit of athletic excellence runs counter to our society’s drive for radical inclusion. (AP Photo/Abby Parr)
He cites other examples of individuals or institutions that have achieved excellence that demonstrate that they violate the idea of fairness in outcomes. He pointed to a lecture at a US university where he asked students if they believed their institution was “fully inclusive.”
All the students nodded, Barron recalled, so he raised the fact with them that there was “a group of people” who were “excluded from the process so that you could be included in this university.”
“I’m not judging the school at all. I’m not saying it’s unfair. I’m saying they want to be an elite school. So, they exclude all kinds of people in order to include the really good students,” Barron said before expressing the same sentiment to members of the world-class symphony orchestra.
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