Excerpt of the Day: John Fund on the Reax to the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative
From Fund’s column Monday at OpinionJournal.com (bolds are mine):
From the outraged cries of affirmative action diehards, you would think the dark night of fascism was descending with the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. Mary Sue Coleman is president of the University of Michigan, which has already spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars defending its racial preferences in courts. She addressed what Tom Bray of the Detroit News called “a howling mob of hundreds of student and faculty protestors” last week. “Diversity matters at Michigan,” she declared. “It matters today, and it will matter tomorrow.” Echoes of George Wallace, who in 1963 declared from the steps of Alabama’s Capitol: “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Ms. Coleman isn’t the only Michigan official to employ Wallace-style rhetoric against MCRI. Detroit’s Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick told a fundraiser last April that the measure would usher in an era of racial prejudice. “Bring it on!” he bellowed. “We will affirm to the world that affirmative action will be here today, it will be here tomorrow, and there will be affirmative action in the state forever.”
Another leader in Michigan’s massive resistance is Karen Moss, the executive director of the state ACLU. “I do think it’s necessary for the courts to slow this thing down and . . . interpret some of the language,” she told the Washington Post. That “thing” is an amendment that simply states: “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.” As the blog Discriminations.us notes, “What part of that language does the ACLU find vague or unclear and in need of “interpretation’?”
Jeez. Even Sandra Day O’Connor said in the University of Michigan law school case that affirmative action should be gone in 25 years — well short of Mary Sue Coleman’s and Kwame Fitzpatrick’s “timelines.”
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UPDATE: Stephen Bainbridge at TCS Daily goes into how California’s university system has been working to get around that state’s Prop. 209 initiative passed a decade ago. The lengths to which these people will go to do the illegal (and wrong) thing are amazing.
