Conservative philanthropy product Connerly launching 'Super Tuesday for Equal Rights' -- a series of November 2008 anti-affirmative action initiatives
In the aftermath of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling severely limiting the use of race in K-12 integration plans, Ward Connerly is feeling his oats. "I believe that we are now poised for a coup de grâce to say that race preferences in the eyes of the public should not be used," Connerly, the chairman of the Sacramento, California-based American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI), said in response to the Supreme Court's decision. Since 1997 ACRI has received more than $5.7 million from conservative philanthropies for its anti-affirmative action activities.
If Connerly's new Super Tuesday for Equal Rights campaign is successful, the day after the November 2008 presidential election affirmative action will be one giant step closer to oblivion. The mastermind behind anti-affirmative action initiatives in California, Michigan, and Washington, has set his sights on five new states -- Missouri, Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. "This is going to be Super Tuesday for equal rights," Connerly said. "I think it's very clear that we are witnessing an end to an era."
In 1997, Connerly along with Thomas 'Dusty' Rhodes, co-founded the American Civil Rights Institute (website), a national non-profit organization pro-actively opposed to affirmative action. Connerly rocketed into the national spotlight -- and the hearts of conservatives -- with Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative that outlawed race and gender preferences in state hiring and university admissions.
Connerly-sponsored anti-affirmative action initiatives have a Frank Luntz-ian bent to them. Luntz is the GOP political consultant/pollster/Fox News Channel contributor who has been debasing language for partisan political purposes for more than a decade. As Diversity Inc.'s Jennifer Millman pointed out in a late-August report, Connerly "makes an easy sell to the public by calling for 'equal opportunity' and a 'colorblind society,' [which is] a distortion of civil-rights language that has duped the public into banning affirmative action in public education, employment and contracting."
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