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Colorado: The Good Guys Win A Round

About two weeks ago I wrote about Deviousness And Duplicity From Colorado Preferentialists, which discussed the effort of opponents of colorblind equality to defeat the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative by ?dissembling and confusion.?

Those opponents proposed a fraudulent initiative of their own whose first clause purported, in language identical to the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, to prohibit all state preferential treatment of individuals or groups based on race, ethnicity, etc., but whose second clause obliterated the first by stating that it applied only to those measures that had already been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. As I wrote in my former post,

What this initiative would do, if passed, is ... absolutely nothing, which is the clear intent and purpose of its proposers. It would prohibit all race/sex/ethnic preference programs by the state, except those that are consistent with any that the Supreme Court has not explicitly found unconstitutional. It would, in short, prohibit only preferential programs that are currently illegal.

In short, the proposed initiative is a fraud, clearly intended to deceive voters into thinking they are prohibiting preferences when the effect of the initiative would actually be to preserve them....

The State Title Board originally approved this proposed initiative. In response, a Motion for Rehearing was filed that argued, among other points, that

[t]he proposed initiative is nothing more than a Trojan horse. It is designed to trick voters into believing that they are voting to limit thepower of the state to engage in discrimination and preferential treatment when in fact they would be voting for a measure that allows the state to engage in all discrimination and preferential treatment allowed under the United States Constitution....

In a unanimous 3?0 vote this morning, the Title Board agreed, rejecting the proposed initiative.

Proponents of preferential treatment may now appeal this ruling to the state Supreme Court, but at least for now sanity has prevailed in Colorado.

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).