FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Monday April 23, 2007

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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