Monday, October 20, 2008

Ending Race and Gender-Based Discrimination

Dan Parsons passes along a well-written article from the Wall Street Journal that deals with ending race and gender-based discrimination, one example of which is the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative on this election ballot.

While choosing between tickets featuring Barack Obama or Sarah Palin this November, voters in Colorado and Nebraska will also be able to bury the idea that blacks and women in America still need special help to get ahead.

In those states, the ballot will carry civil rights initiatives to end race and gender preferences in public hiring and education. Led by Ward Connerly's American Civil Rights Institute, the measures would take a chip out of racial preferences that have committed the same kinds of discrimination they were designed to prevent.


If passing laws to ban discrimination sounds like a triumph for civil rights, you wouldn't know it from the heckling of opponents, who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep the measures off ballots around the country, using tactics from lawsuits to voter deception to defeat the plans...


Read the rest of the WSJ article here.