Harvard Law dean Martha Minow made this comment in her e-mail to the Harvard community on the Stephanie Grace affair:

This sad and unfortunate incident prompts both reflection and reassertion of important community principles and ideals. We seek to encourage freedom of expression, but freedom of speech should be accompanied by responsibility. This is a community dedicated to intellectual pursuit and social justice. The circulation of one student’s comment does not reflect the views of the school or the overwhelming majority of the members of this community.

This is the kind of enforced doublethink that makes anyone who can’t lie to himself feel he is operating under a soft tyranny. It would be better to say:

Theoretically, we believe in freedom of expression and freedom of speech, but the fact is, we have made “diversity” and “social justice” higher priorities, and we can’t let anything pass that would call their tenets into question, even in a private e-mail or at a private dinner party. Diversity and social justice mean that we profess the absolute equality of the groups in all areas and we expect to see that in actual results, or at least pretend that we do. We have repudiated equal justice for individuals under the law as an ideal. In fact, we are more than willing to sacrifice it, along with other ideals, such as freedom of speech, in order to enforce group equality.

Equal justice under the law, freedom of speech, and other traditional American ideals are in opposition to social justice and diversity. For years we got away with obscuring that by evoking “equality,” which sounds like an American ideal, except that we meant group equality and rather dishonestly intimated that this would be consistent with fulfillment of American promise. But now, under President Obama and a fully Democratic regime, the mask is coming off and we may as well be honest about what we are doing.