Crusader for colorblindness

Ward Connerly has spent more than a decade fighting against “diversity” quotas and doesn’t plan to quit anytime soon in his battle to bring colorblindness to government policies.

The 67-year-old former regent of the University of California says, however, that he is getting tired of also having to fight his supposed allies in the Republican Party.

“The conservative movement needs to get out of the shadow of the Republican Party,” Mr. Connerly declared earlier this month at the 34th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington.

Co-founder of the American Civil Rights Coalition, a nonprofit group that has promoted race-neutrality initiatives in several states, Mr. Connerly says he recently has become more frustrated with Republican officials.

“I’ve been haunted by the fact that the Republicans have been increasingly becoming more cowardly and less inclined to support the principle of equal treatment for several years,” he said in a telephone interview with The Washington Times.

Mr. Connerly’s war against discriminatory policies began in California, where he was a leading spokesman for Proposition 209, the pioneering ballot measure that prohibited public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race, sex or ethnicity. The measure overcame fierce opposition to get 54 percent of the vote in 1996, surviving later court challenges and effectively ending “affirmative action” programs in California’s government, including its public universities.

Yet Mr. Connerly says that early victory was achieved with only feeble support from Republicans, including former New York Rep. Jack Kemp — long known as a Republican champion of minority rights — who was the party’s 1996 vice-presidential candidate.

“Jack Kemp skirted all around the issue and finally sort of sheepishly endorsed Proposition 209, but his heart wasn’t in it, and everybody could see it,” Mr. Connerly says.

The trend has grown steadily worse, he says. “George W. Bush would never answer the question about the issue. To this day, we really don’t know where he stands on [Proposition] 209 and measures such as that. …

“I guess all of that, leading up to the Michigan election, where [gubernatorial candidate] Dick DeVos, a very prominent conservative Republican, opposed the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, not on the merits of the issue, but on tactical political reasons, we all believe.”

Despite Republican opposition, the Michigan initiative supported by Mr. Connerly passed in November with 58 percent of the vote.

That experience, he says, “led me to conclude that conservatives are to the Republican Party what blacks are to the Democrat Party — both are taken for granted. Just as the Democrat Party doesn’t have to worry about the black vote, Republicans believe they don’t have to worry about the conservative vote.”

Mr. Connerly’s battle for colorblind policies has won him the admiration of Jennifer Gratz, who sued the University of Michigan when she was denied admittance in 1995. The lawsuit reached the Supreme Court as Gratz v. Bollinger, and in a landmark 2003 decision, the high court ruled the university’s admissions policies were unconstitutional.

In 2004, Miss Gratz joined Mr. Connerly’s coalition as director of state and local initiatives, and was a spokesman for last year’s Michigan initiative.

“Ward embodies the American spirit,” Miss Gratz said at CPAC, where she received this year’s Ronald Reagan Award. “Oftentimes, I hear people refer to Ward Connerly as one of the most principled people in America. I have to say he is the most principled man that I know.”

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