Ward Connerly picks 4 targets for the National Primary
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports: Several prominent critics of affirmative action announced in Denver today that they would seek to place a referendum banning racial, ethnic, and gender preferences on the ballot in Colorado in November 2008. And while the chief group leading the effort — the American Civil Rights Institute — has not yet formally announced its plans for other similar campaigns, it clearly intends to put such measures on the November 2008 ballot in Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma, and one other yet-to-be-determined state as part of what it is calling a “Super Tuesday for Equal Rights.”
The Colorado effort is being overseen at the local level by a new group, called the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative. Its executive director, Valery Pech Orr, was one plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1995 decision Adarand Constructors v. Pena, which dealt with the use of affirmative action in awarding government contracts. In a written statement issued today, Ms. Orr expressed optimism that the proposed ban on affirmative-action preferences would pass there, just as similar measures were overwhelmingly adopted by voters in California in 1996, Washington State in 1998, and Michigan last fall.
A group calling itself the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative plans to hold a news conference tomorrow in Kansas City, Mo. Similar organizations plan to hold news conferences in Oklahoma on Wednesday and in Arizona on Thursday. The American Civil Rights Institute also hopes to get such a measure on the ballot in either Nebraska or South Dakota, although it has not decided which one. -- The Chronicle: Daily News Blog: 4 States Are New Targets for Bans on Affirmative-Action Preferences