Here is a typical argument urging the Supreme Court to “affirm diversity,” from an editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:
Anyone who pays attention knows that America has evolved into a colorful quilt of a country. So to us, there is nothing contradictory about deliberate policies to help make a school, workplace or community more diverse. America is a multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial society, and its institutions should be too.
This is not an unworthy principle. The problem is that implementing it requires a form of government regulation of the racial and ethnic mix of various institutions, which inevitably and fundamentally conflicts with the principle that every individual should be judged without regard to race, color, or national origin.
In short, we are faced with a choice of two incompatible principles. Choosing diversity would require scrapping the nondiscrimination principle and the civil rights laws that enforce it. Choosing nondiscrimination, on the other hand, is perfectly compatible with a society that comprises “a colorful quilt” of races and ethnicities. Indeed, as I argued at some length here, it was out of the experience of just such a society — colonial America, with its multitude of contentious and conflicting religious sects — that the nondiscrimination principle and its attendant requirement of official neutrality emerged.
