Colorado and Nebraska Attempt to End State-Sponsored Race and Gender Preferences

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.

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.

Defenders of group-based preferences have long warned that minorities couldn't succeed in a system that doesn't give them special advantages. But far from turning back the clock for African-Americans and women, ending preferences will allow minorities and women to take the full credit for their accomplishments. Barack Obama and Sarah Palin have shown the roads are open.

~Today's Wall Street Journal

From my Detroit Free Press article two years ago when Michigan voted to end racial double-standards here:

President John F. Kennedy said: "Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races and national origins contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in racial discrimination." Hopefully, Kennedy's vision will prevail this fall when Michigan (and now Colorado and Nebraska) voters have an opportunity to end state-sponsored racial discrimination in college admissions at Michigan (Colorado and Nebraska) public universities.

In 2006 when Michigan voters considered Proposal 2 to end racial and gender preferences, 80 out of 83 Michigan counties voted in favor of ending state-sponsored racial and gender discrimination.