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Initiative to Scuttle Affirmative Action Faces Court Challenge
Capitol Media Services
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 07.01.2008
PHOENIX — Opponents of a citizens' initiative to end affirmative action and other preference programs sued Monday to block the measure from getting on the ballot.
Attorney Shanta Driver said the suit was filed, at least in part, because foes want to kill the initiative before Arizona's mostly white voters get to vote on it.
The lawsuit contends campaign organizers are deliberately deceiving petition circulators and signers into believing it is a "civil rights" initiative that also would "ban discrimination."
The exact wording would make it illegal to "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."
Driver, a Detroit attorney who unsuccessfully tried to have a similar measure knocked off the 2006 Michigan ballot, said that is misleading "because it's to eliminate affirmative action."
"The truth of the matter is, whenever you ask a majority-white electorate to make a determination, are they going to protect white privilege or are they going to advance black and Latino equality, over and over again, in the privacy of a voting booth, they vote to uphold and advance white privilege," Driver said.
"You have a situation in which you're asking a white majority to decide whether a Latino or black minority have equal rights," she said. "And that is something that we think cannot be put up to a vote," Driver said, saying it would be like asking Alabama voters in the 1950s to vote on equal rights for blacks.
Max McPhail, director of the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, did not dispute Driver's contention that the main goal of the measure is to end any program that gives any preferences to any group. He said, though, there is nothing misleading about calling it a "civil rights" initiative.
"Civil rights applies to all people, regardless of their race or their sex," McPhail said. "To give someone preference based on something like a characteristic like race goes against what civil rights really means."
But Pamela Brown, one of the people who signed the petition, said there is no question that use of the words "civil rights" was designed to mislead.
Brown, who is black, said she grew up in the 1950s and 1960s watching the TV coverage of fire hoses being turned on civil rights protesters in the South.
"When you say 'civil rights' to a person of my era, that's what we go back to," she said.
Calvin Goode, a former member of the Phoenix City Council, said he saw blacks such as himself being urged at Juneteenth celebrations last month to sign the measure to protect civil rights.
McPhail said anyone who read the text of the initiative, which legally must be attached to the petition, would see it bans preferential treatment.
Brown, who signed the petition, conceded she did not look at the language. Goode refused to sign. "I recognized what it was," he said.
The lawsuit, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, contends trying to put the initiative on the ballot using "racially targeted fraud" violates constitutional provisions protecting both equal rights and free elections. That, the legal papers say, should automatically mean that the initiative is not entitled to go on the ballot, no matter how many signatures are submitted.
Initiative backers need to file 230,047 valid signatures before Friday to get the issue on the November ballot.
Ward Connerly, who is bankrolling the petition drive, was the driving force behind the original measure adopted by California voters in 1996. He has since pushed through similar proposals in Michigan and Washington.
This year, in addition to Arizona, he is attempting to get the question on the ballot in Nebraska and Colorado; efforts to qualify in Missouri and Oklahoma were withdrawn when there were insufficient valid signatures.