(NAME-MCE) Plans for Anti-Preferences Campaign Announced Denver CO

[Anselmo Villanueva]

Colorado will be a battleground over affirmative action next year, and
it is likely to be joined by four other states. On Monday, critics of
affirmative action announced plans to place an item on the ballot in
Colorado next year that would bar affirmative action in public higher
education admissions and in employment by state agencies. The
initiative will be modeled on measures that have been approved by
voters in California, Washington State and Michigan.

Ward Connerly, leader of a national campaign against affirmative
action, said he expected five measures on state ballots next year. He
will be holding press conferences in Missouri, Arizona and Oklahoma
later this week, most likely to announce similar campaigns. But in an
interview, he said that he was still studying other possibilities.
Connerly said that he had turned down requests from some groups that
he push the issue in their states because he was concerned that those
groups "were not furthering the cause of race relations" and may be
hostile to some racial or ethnic groups. He named Nebraska, Utah and
Oregon as other states where he may try to get an item on the ballot.

http://www.coloradocri.org/

Colorado Civil Rights Initiative

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Monday April 23, 2007

CONTACT: VALERY PECH ORR (303) 968-7077

COLORADO CIVIL RIGHTS INITIATIVE COMING TO 2008 BALLOT

Plans for Anti-Preferences Campaign Announced

Denver Colorado - The Colorado Civil Rights Initiative is moving
forward with plans for a November, 2008 ballot measure banning
government-sponsored race and gender preferences in the state. The
Colorado Civil Rights Initiative will be part of a 'Super Tuesday for
Equal Rights' campaign that will offer citizens of several states the
chance to end such practices in public employment, public education
and public contracting. Similar measures have already passed in three
other states, all by overwhelming margins.

Colorado Civil Rights Initiative Executive Director Valery Pech Orr,
formerly co-plaintiff in the Adarand case, which challenged the
constitutionality of preferences in the awarding of federal contracts,
said such a measure is long overdue.  "It boils down to the basic
question of who we are as a people," she says. "Are we really all
equal, as we claim, or are we to be judged primarily by our gender and
skin color? My family has been in Colorado for generations - my great
grandparents homesteaded here in 1883. We in this state are
individualists, racial and gender preferences run counter to our most
basic values, and we expect that will be made abundantly clear on
November 4, 2008."

Also attending the press conference will be Ward Connerly, chairman of
the Sacramento-based American Civil Rights Institute and longtime
crusader for a colorblind America. "Getting our nation to the point of
applying a single standard to all Americans is one of the most crucial
issues of our time," says Connerly, who helped lead the earlier
successful anti-preferences campaigns in California, Washington state
and, most recently, Michigan, and will be working closely with the
Colorado Civil Rights Initiative.

"If events of the past couple of weeks have taught us anything at all,
it is that race will continue to divide our nation as long as we
insist on treating people differently," said Connerly.  "Both Don
Imus, in his despicable comments about the young women of the Rutgers
basketball team, and those who rushed to judgment in the Duke lacrosse
case made the same mistake: they looked at individuals and saw only
skin color. We have to get past that kind of thinking - and we must
start by getting our government out of the business of privileging
some Americans for the color of their skin and penalizing others. By
now it should be clear that that leads only to bitterness and
discord," said Connerly.

"Racial preferences have not only harmed better qualified white and
Asian students who have been passed over for admission, but the black
and Hispanic students who are the intended beneficiaries," adds
acclaimed rights activist, nationally syndicated columnist, Chairman
of One Nation Indivisible, and Colorado native Linda Chavez, who will
also appear at the press conference.  Chavez, who will serve as the
Initiative's Honorary Co-Chairman continues, "I have seen firsthand
the unintended consequences at the University of Colorado (Boulder),
where I taught in the university's first affirmative action
program—students who struggled to complete coursework for which they
were ill-prepared, embittered in the process, many of them dropping
out. No one benefits when students are held to different standards
based on the color of their skin.  Nor can preferential admissions
based on race make up for the often unequal educational opportunities
that disadvantaged students encounter in public schools throughout the
nation."

The operative clause of the proposed ballot initiative reads as
follows:  "The state shall not discriminate against or grant
preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of
race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of
public employment, public education or public contracting."

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