Tempe Tantrums

The debate over the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative is now getting off the ground, and an interesting debate it is.

One perennial element of this debate surfaced today in an Arizona Republic news article: the nearly schizophrenic argument that a ban on racial preference is not needed because the state/county/city/school/etc. employs no racial preferences, but that the adoption of the measure banning such non-existent preferences would have a devastating effect.

Consider, first, the article headline: “Affirmative action bill could impact Tempe recruitment.” Now consider the following from the text:

In practice, Tempe doesn’t use race or gender as a factor in choosing new government hires or contractors, said Rosa Inchausti, manager of the city’s diversity department.

“We don’t weigh minorities any higher for the recruitment process,” she said. “Ours is race neutral, with no preferential numbering or treatment. The best person is going to get the job regardless of their race or gender.”

But making it illegal to give any preferences based on race or gender could impact the city’s recruitment practices, depending on the ballot initiative’s wording.

The assertion that “Tempe doesn’t use race or gender as a factor in choosing new government hires or contractors” must have come as quite a surprise to a number of those government officials doing Tempe’s hiring and contracting. Those officials were no doubt responding to a “diversity audit” that criticized the city because its staff is “72 percent White, whereas the city’s population is 66 percent White” and because “68 percent of the staff is male” while only “52 percent of Tempe’s residents are male.”

The Tempe Fire Department, for example, has been undergoing a concentrated effort to increase the number of female job candidates after being repeatedly singled out in those diversity audits….

As turnover occurs, the Fire Department emphasizes recruiting female athletes from Arizona State University and local community colleges to find women likely to meet the rigorous demands of the Fire Department testing process as an attempt to diversify the pool of candidates, Fire Chief Cliff Jones and Assistant Fire Chief Jim Gaintner have said in the past.

The Fire Department also has a special allotment of recruitment money of about $15,000 to be used specifically for recruiting minority job candidates, said Capt. Rich Woerth, a fire union leader.

Tempe, of course, is not alone in arguing that there are no preferences to ban but the sky will fall if ACRI is passed. For example, an article from the East Valley Tribune begins:

A measure proposed for the 2008 ballot banning Arizona governments and schools from considering race and gender when hiring or admitting students would have little to no effect if it passed.

Despite that, local civil rights leaders are pledging to fight it, saying it’s largely a symbolic gesture that sends a message of intolerance.

So, “civil rights leaders” regard a proposal barring state-sponsored discrimination against or preferential treatment of any individual based on race, sex, or ethnicity as a “symbolic … message of intolerance”?

Some civil rights.

Say What?