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AUGUST 1998

Connerly takes lead favoring I-200

BELLEVUE (Monday 8-10-98)--Ward Connerly, one of the country's most vocal critics of affirmative action, lent a hand Sunday to supporters of a Washington measure that would ban race and gender preferences in state and local government.

Connerly joined 25 sign-carrying proponents of Initiative 200 who marched and changed slogans for a half-hour outside a US Bank in this affluent Seattle suburb. The bank was not open for business.

The group was protesting the bank's opposition of the measure, now the country's only test of affirmative action scheduled for 1998 on the ballots.

 

We're trying to get businesses like US Bank to stop hiding behind terms like diversity and affirmative action,' said Connerly, a University of California regent who in 1996 led the drive for Proposition 209, the voter-approved campaign to dismantle affirmative action.

 

"Businesses who oppose I-200 obviously must be either supporting discrimination or preferential treatment," he said.

According to Connerly, the California-based American Civil Rights Institute, which he runs, will be withdrawing $600,000--all its support--from a US Bank branch in Sacramento.

 

John Carlson, cochairman of the I-200 campaign, said the gesture would show companies that "political pressure will be more than matched by economic pressure" from customers if companies continued to oppose the measure.

 

Officials at the bank's corporate offices in Denver could not be reached for comment Sunday.

Representatives of some of the biggest businesses in the state --including Boeing, Paccar, Puget Sound Energy, Nordstrom, US Bank, Washington Mutual, Washington Water Power and powerful Seattle law firms--joined Gov. Gary Locke during this year's legislative session to oppose the initiative.

If approved by Washington voters this fall, I-200--which has language similar to the California measure--would ban preferences for women and minorities in government hiring, contracting and college admissions. Most state and local affirmative action programs would be eliminated as a result.

Connerly, who was in town for a fund-raiser for U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn, R-Bellevue, said the Washington measure does not represent a rollback in affirmative action like opponents contend but instead represents equality between races.

"I-200 is the most egalitarian concept on this planet. It is the Civil Rights Act of 1964," he said.

The 59-year old Republican businessman grew up in Louisiana and is of Indian, Irish, French and African descent. He said he has not received much preferential treatment because of his ethnicity.

"I don't want anything to be taken away from me because of my skin color, and I don't want to take away anything," he said. "So why should I give something to somebody I'm not willing to accept myself?"

A recent poll conducted for The Seattle Times showed 64 percent of voters were in favor of I-200, with 25 percent against and 11 percent undecided.

 

The ballot title asks: "Shall government be prohibited from discriminating or granting preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in public employment, education and contracting?"

Opponents say it's unfair and misleading to leave out references to affirmative action--and doubly misleading to use the term "preferential treatment," which they say many people react against because it smacks of illegal quotas and opportunities for the unqualified.