Diversity in the Orthodox Community

No, I'm not talking about the Black Hats (a.k.a. The Chillul Hashem community) vs the Kippa Srugot. I'm talking about real diversity, you know, the kind they teach you about in diversity training. There isn't much of it in OJ. 99% of us are white and middle class. None of us are openly gay; gay people either go OTD, or are forced to repress their gayness. Most people are pro Israel and have similar political views.

But according to my diversity training, diversity is a very good thing, with lots of benefits. In recent years a little tiny bit of diversity has crept in, in the form of Baalei Teshuvas, though many of them, in an effort to try and fit in, have become the biggest robot-sheep-conformists of all.

True, we do argue a lot about the minutae - is Breishis the literal word of God or the metaphorical word of God, but the differences between the extreme fundamentalists and the not quite so extreme fundamentalists are really insignificant compared to the diversity that exists in the rest of the world. I have posted about this before - its the narcissism of small differences. This occurs for a number of reasons - we're all so tightly intertwined, that even small differences become large. We agree on all the big things so the only things left to argue about are by nature the small things. We're all nuts.

So the question is, does our community suffer due to lack of diversity? The whole point of a religious community is that is is founded on shared goals and ideals. On the other hand, too much of that creates robot-sheep-conformists.

Bottom line: I think we probably could benefit from some more diversity.