Catholic Bishop Robert Barron says society’s love for athletic "excellence" on display at this year’s Olympic Games runs contrary to its current preoccupation with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, and other efforts to ensure people have equality of outcomes in life rather than opportunity.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, the bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota and 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 out other athletes to become the best. In other words, she excluded individuals who didn’t measure up in her sport.
"Well, that's not only unjust, but it militates against the very excellence that we're celebrating," Barron told Fox, regarding how forced equality of outcomes goes against what people cheer so hard for at the Olympics.
Bishop Barron said there’s a "tension" between athletic achievement and so-called equity.
"I don't think you can really have both those things at the same time," he said, noting that there is an important difference between equity of outcome and "equality of opportunity."
He used the record-breaking gymnast – who he called the "greatest of all time" – to make the point: "Let's say if at some point in her career, Simone Biles was told, 'No, no, you can't go out for the gymnastics team because you're Black or because you're a woman' or whatever. Of course, that's unjust. And that should always be fought any time at any level."
He continued, "Well, there's that – equality of opportunity. But then there's equity of outcome, which our society now seems to be highly prizing; so that the outcome of a situation or a particular walk of life should correspond to, let's say, the racial breakdown of a society, etc."
Bishop Barron declared the latter framework unjust. He then went on to describe how Biles achieving a higher athletic standard than practically everyone else on earth in her field is contrary to that, and praiseworthy.
"She stands at the pinnacle of Olympic excellence because along the arc of her life, armies of people have been excluded. Now what I mean is, not that they weren't given equality of opportunity. What I mean is, well, she won a medal, which means the other people competing with her didn't win the medal."
"She made team after team after team, which meant all kinds of other people that went out for the team were excluded," he added.
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He used other examples of people or institutions achieving excellence as flying in the face of the equity of outcomes philosophy. He mentioned speaking at an American university where he asked the students if they believed their institution had achieved "complete inclusivity."
Barron recounted that all the students nodded, so he confronted them with the fact that there was "an army of people" that was "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 unjust. I'm saying they want to be an elite school. And so, they excluded all kinds of people so that the really excellent students might be included," Barron said, before making the same point with members of a world-class orchestra.
