I’m pleased to announce the kickoff of the “Super Tuesday of Equality” campaign.
Ward Connerly, Chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, is the man behind the anti-race preferences in government momentum. Campaigns kicked off this week in Colorado, Missouri, and Arizona.
The campaigns are a push to place initiatives on the November 4, 2008, ballot against skin color preferences. Connerly and company have already encouraged three states to pay more than lip service to equality and ban government-mandated race and sex preferences in government hiring and admissions.
Californians passed Proposition 209 by 54 percent in 1996, and the state of Washington passed I-200 with 58.3 percent of the vote in 1998. The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which appeared on the November 7, 2006, ballot as Proposal 2 after facing challenges by several groups, passed with 58 percent of the vote. (Also see An Affirmative Action Lesson for Mary Sue Coleman)
Michigan voters have spoken, but groups continue to challenge the will of the people and fight for skin color preferences for a certain race.
Linda Chavez, Colorado native and chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, said, “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. 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 proposed language for the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), subject to change: “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.”
Missouri: “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.”
Valery Pech Orr, executive director of CCRI, asked, “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.”
Orr was a co-plaintiff in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña (1995). Adarand sued the government for its use of race to award contracts, citing a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. An appeals court affirmed the lower court’s summary judgment for the plaintiffs and held that racial discrimination claims should be reviewed under immediate scrutiny rather than the more appropriate standard (in my opinion) of strict scrutiny. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that racial classifications imposed (mandated) by all levels of government must be reviewed under the strict scrutiny standard.
Under strict scrutiny, it’s almost impossible to justify racial classifications. In other words, the standard is designed to nullify any law that treats people differently based on race. While this concept is easier to understand in the context of Jim Crow and southern resistance to integration, Americans have lost sight of just how odious government-mandated racial classifications truly are, especially black Americans, some of whom unabashedly support discrimination as long as blacks benefit. History has a nasty way of repeating itself, so be careful what you wish for.
It’s shameful that we’re still battling against racial discrimination by the government in 2007, isn’t it? 
Says Ward Connerly (emphasis added), “Getting our nation to the point of applying a single standard to all Americans is one of the most crucial issues of our time. 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. 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.”
Connerly is the author of Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences. See the book review.
Update: Blogger John Rosenberg at Discriminations has more on Super Tuesday for Equality.
I just received word that Oklahoma is on the equality bandwagon, too. State representative Randy Terrill said, “We believe the people of Oklahoma are fair and believe in equal treatment under the law. Ward Connerly and his organizations have done excellent work exposing policies that divide us and now we are delighted to have his support in pursuing the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative.”
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The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie.
So begins a straight-forward commentary “The Big White Lie,” by a novelist named Andrew Klavan. A conservative born in New York and currently living in California, Klavan discusses truth, the idea of calling a thing by its name, and liberalism’s aversion to it.
Over the years, truth telling has become something “polite” people don’t do in public. By way of example, Klavan begins:
The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.
First, I’m glad Klavan recognized Toni Morrison as a superior writer to Alice “The Color Purple” Walker. I’ve always thought so, though Walker is probably more well known. As the author of one of my favorite books of all time, Song of Solomon, Morrison studied, understands, and appreciates the works of good writers, regardless of race. Her style has been compared to William Faulkner’s, one of America’s great southern writers.
With a decreasing emphasis on studying the Western canon, too many people have lost the ability to understand what is good and what is crap. With politically correct pabulum flowing through the streets like raw sewage, we’re knee-deep in crap, and people from the highest office to the lowest rung are afraid to call it crap.
But I digress. As Klavan acknowledges, it is politically incorrect to tell the truth. To call abortion murder is to be an extremist who wants to send women back to the Victorian era. Personal responsibility, accountability, and a desire to speak out for and protect the unborn limit a woman’s “rights,” I guess. For anyone to say that out-of-control black crime and illegitimacy rates are destroying the black community and that the responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of those committing the crimes and having babies by different men is to be self-hating if you’re black and a racist if you’re white.
In 1996, registered nurse Brenda Pratt Shafer told the House Subcommittee on the Constitution about a partial birth abortion she’d witnessed.
A woman was six months pregnant with a baby diagnosed with Down Syndrome. She chose death for the child. Shafer testified that she saw the baby’s beating heart on the ultrasound monitor. The so-called doctor pulled the baby into the birth canal with forceps, partially delivering his body while leaving the head inside.
“The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall …The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby was completely limp. I was really completely unprepared for what I was seeing. I almost threw up as I watched the doctor do these things.”
Continue reading “Supreme Court Says No to ‘Intact’ Infanticide.”
Previous post: Supreme Court Upholds Ban On Partial Birth Abortion
Through the years, I’ve accumulated over 500 books (not counting Bibles), presently squeezed onto two five-shelf bookcases, one three-shelf bookcase, four small tables, and a desk.
A few of my favorites:
- Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
- Harry Potter series (Books 1-6), by J.K. Rowling
- The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor
- Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, by Charles Murray
- The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S. Collins
- A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, by Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt
- The Renegade Writer: The Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success, by Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell
How many books do you own?
Some schools are taking pre-emptive action against Department of Justice (DOJ) investigations and private citizen lawsuits by removing blatantly illegal, racially exclusive language from scholarships and replacing it with the new descriptor, “urban.”
Urban, of course, is code for “black.” Northeastern University has opened its Ujima Scholars program to all students, but with a catch. The program will target students from an “urban background.” (Source)
Questions like, “If Northeastern is already predominately a White university, why should the Ujima programs be used for White students?” uttered by Lula Petty-Edwards, director of the school’s African American Institute, are totally irrelevant to the illegality of racially exclusive scholarships.
Northeastern, a private research university, receives federal (taxpayer-funded) grants. That brings it within the purview of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (”No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”) In that regard, the school also may want to remove racially exclusive language from other scholarships and fellowships.
The National Black Republican Association reprinted two of my op-eds in the current issue of its magazine, The Black Republican. Click on the image to download a PDF copy.
Read the whole thing. If you want to cut to the chase, check out pages 33 (37 in the PDF) and 49 (53 in the PDF) for my pieces. Notice that I included “self-described independent conservative” in the tagline. I wanted readers to know that I am not a Republican nor a member of any political party. With the exception of belonging to a church, I break out in hives at the thought of joining groups.
Must be some unresolved childhood issue.
Unrelated Update (4/20): A stripper quoted me in an op-ed she wrote for an alternative newspaper in Colorado. The topic? The Duke case.
Radical feminists and other blood-thirsty infanticide supporters must be crying in their collective beer right about now. Here’s a PDF copy of the opinion. Read more here.
(If you’re neither a radical feminist nor blood-thirsty, you shouldn’t be offended by the characterization.)
For the ignorant, a so-called partial birth abortion is a procedure in which a woman allows a “doctor” to pull her baby down the birth canal, delivering him partially to avoid murder charges (he’s considered a person in utero only if he’s “wanted,” you see), and inserting a probe or scissors into his skull, killing him. You’ve come a long way, baby!
More from me on this later…
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