Discriminations

Missouri, you will recall, is the state where obstructionism by the Democratic Secretary of State and Attorney General, later declared illegal, and thuggish intimidation of petition signers succeeded in keeping the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative off the ballot this year.

It is easy to understand why supporters of racial preferences were so afraid to give citizens the opportunity to enshrine the “without regard” principle of colorblind equality into their state constitution. Racial preferences are so unpopular that there is no doubt about how citizens would vote, if allowed to by their Democratic office-holders.

Indeed, as I have commented before, racial preferences are so unpopular thats the term “affirmative action,” usually thought to be more appealing (because it obscures the actual nature of preference policies) is itself rapidly coming into disrepute. As I noted (here) last month:

The Kansas City, Kansas, Community College (KCKCC) is launching a new program to hire minorities, but for some reason it is reluctant to call this program “affirmative action.”

Kansas City Kansas Community College announced this week they would actively seek qualified minorities to fill open positions at the college....

However, college staff stopped short of referring to the plan as “affirmative action.”

“We can only hire individuals for these jobs if vacancies are available,” said Leota Marks, dean of human resources at the college. “We are not setting quotas and we’re not planning to hire someone who is qualified just because they are a minority or female. But we know we have to take some affirmative steps and develop a diversified workforce.”

Dean Marks, it seems, defines “affirmative action” as a program that sets quotas to hire people “just because they are a minority or female” for openings that do not exist.

And people wonder why it’s unpopular....

Lest you think the above view of affirmative action (by someone who both practices and supports it) is unique, note than now another official at another Missouri college has taken great pains to deny that his affirmative action policies are ... affirmative action policies. In doing so he once again unwittingly reveals the growing perception of what “affirmative action” entails.

Lincoln Scott, Assistant to the President for Diversity and Equal Opportunity at Southeast Missouri State University, has been in charge of recruiting more minority faculty.

At conferences and through existing faculty, Scott identified people who would be good fits. He spent hours on the phone. Eventually the university paid to fly in five people. They were shown the community and introduced to faculty members.

“I don’t want to use the expression ‘wine and dine,’ but I gave them a good time,” Scott said.

The participants were encouraged to apply. Four out of five were hired....

Scott is quick to point out the none of the filled faculty positions were affirmative action positions. “We had jobs, we needed them filled, and we hired qualified people,” he said.

Scott thus lets slip that an “affirmative action position” is one where no real vacancy exists; it is created in order to allow the hiring of a minority. Another reason Southeast Missouri’s new faculty were not “affirmative action” hires is that they were all “qualified.”

That says volumes about how “affirmative action” is now understood, even by its supporters.

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At their best, liberals have defended free speech for those with whom they disagree; defended the rights of workers to organize even when they didn’t like the unions the workers were likely to choose; and defended voter registration drives even if they suspected the newly registered voters would support candidates the liberals opposed. Liberalism, that is, has in the past been as concerned with fair and democratic procedures as with politically appealing, i.e., Democratic, results. Now that sort of liberalism has, alas, been largely displaced by a results-oriented partisanship, famously derided by one of the founders of the ACLU, Roger Baldwin, as “civil liberties for our side only.”

Take Missouri (Please!). I have already discussed at length how Robin Carnahan, the Democratic Secretary of State, and Jay Nixon, the Democratic Attorney General, have engaged in massively outrageous and illegal conduct in an attempt, unsuccessful so far, to block the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative from getting on the ballot. But enough about that.

Sometimes, as now, what Democratic office holders and their acolytes in the big newspapers (in this case, the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the Kansas City Star) don’t do and don’t say is far worse than what they do and say. As I write, right now, they are doing nothing and saying nothing while the organized defenders of racial preferences are importing and paying to thugs to intimidate, disrupt, and prevent supporters of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative from gathering the signatures necessary to place that discrimination-banning measure on the ballot.

An acquaintance who prefers not to be names emails from the Missouri battlefield:

If you have never seen a blocking operation, it involves individuals who are opposed to the initiative setting up shop adjacent to petition circulators and doing everything possible to keep citizens from signing the petitions being circulated.

The strategy of our opponents is to keep us off the ballot. By Any Means Necessary made it very clear when we started this campaign that such would be their approach. They are now even more aggressive, often sending out three and four physically intimidating individuals to threaten our circulators. In addition, they are sabotaging our efforts by falsely signing petitions.

Harry Stein, who has followed the state battles over civil rights carefully, writes in the current City Journal:

Democratic secretary of state Robin Carnahan, charged with what is normally the routine certification of ballot measures, instead went to work on this one, eliminating its straightforward language, derived from that of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and substituting wording that pleads the other side’s case. The question, as she wanted to pose it to voters, was whether to amend the state’s constitution to “ban affirmative action programs designed to eliminate discrimination against, and improve opportunities for, women and minorities in public contracting, employment and education.” So egregious was this subterfuge that a liberal county circuit judge took the unprecedented step of throwing out Carnahan’s rewrite and reinstating the original language almost intact.

Still, as [Ward] Connerly observes, “all the forces of the Left are converging in Missouri—Acorn and the rest of the race industry, the feminists, the unions, the contractors who feed off this stuff—and George Soros is providing a lot of the funding. They’re enlisting the whole vast left-wing conspiracy—and, believe me, it’s a lot vaster than the supposed right-wing one.” The ugliness is most evident on the streets, where supporters of the ballot initiative are busy gathering signatures. Opponents’ chief tactic is to use “blockers”—often burly union men—to shadow signature gatherers and scare off potential signers by charging not only that the initiative is racist and has the support of the Ku Klux Klan, but also that the signers risk identity theft. In addition, the pro-preferences sources have dispatched their people to sign petitions with false names and addresses, so that they will be invalidated later.

Where is the liberal outrage against this anti-democratic thuggery? Where is their vaunted concern for fair and democratic procedures? Perhaps I’ve missed the editorials in liberal newspapers calling attention to these ongoing attacks on the rights of citizens to engage in the democratic process. Perhaps I’ve missed the attempts of unions to reign in their members who are being used to disrupt the petition-gathering process. If so, please out to me what I’ve missed.

Meanwhile, we can do two things. First, take comfort in what produces this thuggish behavior from opponents of colorblind equality: they know that they would lose if citizens are given the opportunity to vote for or against race preferences. They can’t win an election, so they choose to try to prevent it, By Any Means Necessary.

Second, you, or anyone you know or can enlist, can volunteer to go to Missouri right now (the deadline for submission is May 4) and gather signatures. And you can do well by doing good: earn up to $1000 a week for the next several weeks!

Click on the ad in the column on the right if you’re interested.

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Most defenders of racial preference insist, against all available current evidence, that they believe in the ideal of colorblind equality, in the principle that everyone should be treated “without regard” to race, ethnicity, etc., but they immediately set their professed dedication to that principle aside by maintaining that it is impractical to implement that principle because “the playing field is not level.”

To the best of my knowledge none of these defenders of race preferences, of treating everyone with regard to their race, etc., has defined what he or she means by “level playing field” and how we will know when it has become level. It would be useful if every now and then — say, one out of a hundred or so times a journalist quotes one or another preferentialist defending his or her privilege using that well-worn phrase — the preferee were asked to give a definition.

For example, on Thursday Ward Connerly spoke to a “largely hostile audience” at Truman State University in Missouri. (Since the audience was identified as being at a university, the “largely hostile” adjective was largely redundant.) Afterwards,

Jasmine Pampkin, a sophomore accounting major from St. Louis, said Connerly’s vision of a race-blind society is an ideal that doesn’t match her own reality. Pampkin, who is black, receives a $500 scholarship each semester from a campus multicultural affairs office, as well as an academic scholarship to help defray the estimated $11,000 annual costs of tuition, room and board at the liberal arts school.

“I would love to be able to be looked at just for my academic achievements,” she said after Connerly’s speech. “But I don’t feel it’s an equal playing field.”

Well, of course the ideal of race blindness “doesn’t match her current reality.” How could it, since Ms. Pampkin implies that she receives her two scholarships only because she’s black.

It would, or at least might, have been enlightening if the Associated Press reporter who wrote the article quoting her, Alan Scher Zagier, had asked one or two follow-up questions. For example, in what ways, I wonder, does Ms. Pampkin believe her current “playing field” is not “equal”? Does she believe that if the state of Missouri is barred from awarding benefits based on race, the same administrators who gave her two scholarships totaling $11,500 would immediately then discriminate against her because of her race? (That discrimination, by the way, would also clearly violate the pending Missouri Civil Rights Initiative.)

Another follow-up question might ask Ms. Pampkin why she is afraid that she would not receive the scholarships if her race were not “taken into account,” as the euphemism goes. Is she less poor than the recipient who would otherwise receive the funds? Are her grades less good? If either of those, why does she think she deserves the scholarships? What would she say about the tilt of the playing field to the would-be recipient who, but for his or her race, would have received the scholarship?

In practice (or to stick with my metaphor, real games), it seems to me that the beneficiaries of racial preferences and their defenders don’t want “a level playing field.” They want a set us rules that rewards them and penalizes the other players — they should be required, say, to gain only 7 yards for a first down, not 10; their touchdowns should count 9 points, not 6; they should not be penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct because they come from a group that has been subjected to so much of it; etc.

Rev. Wright is right at home playing this game.

UPDATE [30 March]

From Al Sharpton at one of the 2004 Democratic candidate debates:

“We’ve been told we had three minutes,” he said at a candidates’ forum as a 2004 presidential candidate.

“My good friend Senator Edwards spoke for five. So Joe Lieberman told me that, in the spirit of affirmative action, I get seven.”

Was Lieberman poking fun at affirmative action? Was Sharpton attempting to be funny or using humor to make a serious point? Were the resulting chuckles (if any) produced by the humor or by nervous discomfort? If one believes (as many Democrats and all Democratic leaders do) in racial double standards, i.e., treating some people better and others worse because of their race when they apply to college or for a job or for a government contract, why exactly is Sharpton’s comment funny?

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... that Missouri voters might eliminate their ability to engage in racial discrimination, i.e., “diversity efforts.”

Ann Korschgen, vice provost for enrollment management, recently told the MU faculty council that “a referendum on the ballot in November that would not allow race to be considered in enrollment decisions” would present an “enrollment challenge.”

“We’re concerned that this will have a very chilling impact on our diversity efforts,” Korschgen said.

Of course, if the University of Missouri didn’t place such a heavy racial thumb on the admissions scale, banning its use wouldn’t have such a dramatic impact.

I wonder if Ms. Korschgen would be willing to share with the citizens of Michigan just how MU does “take race into account,” as the euphemism goes.

On second thought, I don’t.

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Missouri is one of five states that may have a civil rights initiative, barring racial and ethnic preferences, on its ballot in November 2008. Supporters of race preferences, i.e., opponents of colorblind, neutral, non-discrimination, have so far been unable to decide whether to criticize the proposed initiative by claiming that the state of Missouri has no race preference policies, and so the initiative is unnecessary, or by claiming that continuing the preferential “affirmative action” policies (the only affirmative action policies that would be affected) is so essential to life as Missouri Democrats know it that passing the initiative would cause the sky to fall. So they have been arguing both.

Meanwhile, in the trenches, in this case from the University of Missouri Kansas City, comes this evidence of “affirmative action” run amok, requiring the continual re-education of faculty members.

“New affirmative action hiring procedures anger Faculty Senate,” reports the UMKC University News.

aculty and administration are at loggerheads over the new affirmative action hiring policy.

The plan requires faculty members to attend a training seminar each and every time they serve on a search committee for hiring new faculty. The pool of potential candidates must also be reviewed by the Affirmative Action Office, and the candidates must undergo an interview with the office.

When the Director of the Office of Diversity, Access and Equity Karen Dace and Affirmative Action Director Grace Hernandez presented a draft of the new requirements for hiring tenured and tenured-track faculty at the Faculty Senate meeting Sept. 18, it was met with a less than enthusiastic response.

Two weeks later, after consulting with their respective units, the senators were even more vocal in their opposition. Though all who spoke were in favor of the principle of affirmative action, they expressed concerns about the feasibility, speed and effectiveness of the new procedures.

Some of their complaints almost make one sympathetic with these supporters of “the principle of affirmative action.”

“We are whole-heartedly against this,” said Senator Peggy Ward-Smith, School of Nursing. “Why is the training recommended for everyone? That’s insulting. It’s not even available online. We don’t have the time.”

She said the lack of diversity in nursing is well known.

“If the [Affirmative Action] Office has a list of diverse Ph.D. candidates, bring it on, because we don’t have it,” Ward-Smith said.

Since I’m not even sure what a “diverse Ph.D. candidate” is, I’d like to see that list, too.

Senator Tom Mardikes, Theatre, wondered what good the interviews with [Director of the Office of Diversity, Access and Equity Karen] Dace’s office would do.

“They’re going to look at the person over all the research and background that the faculty has done and know ‘This person is better because of my three-minute interview’?” he asked.

Faculty Senate Chair Gary Ebersole, Arts and Sciences, said he didn’t think Dace quite understood what it meant when she said she wanted one-on-one interviews with each candidate.

“I don’t know how many hours she has in a day,” he said....

Senator Patricia Marken, School of Pharmacy, said it was offensive to have to repeat the training.

But here’s my favorite:

Senator Cory Beard said the faculty at the School of Computing and Engineering is 75 percent internationally-born.

“What really defines diversity?” he asked. “We brought in African candidates from Eritrea or whatever and they were not considered diverse. It seems like a nebulous target. We have people from all over the world. It looks diverse to us.”

Of course, Beard is an engineer. What would he know of “diversity”?

The more one sees of exactly how “affirmative action” operates in practices, the less surprising it is that even professors are not enthusiastic about it, as reported in my post immediately below.

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The outrageous official misconduct in Missouri, first mentioned here, continues apace. But now it is coming to light, such as in this skewering by the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund.

Fund quotes Ward Connerly observing that the behavior by Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan and Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Jay Nixon, both Democrats, qualify for the “Mike Nifong award for dishonest behavior in the legal profession.”

As usual, Mr. Connerly is too kind.

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Please see my just-posed UPDATE to Outrageous Official Misconduct In Missouri below.

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On Thursday I published a post on Outrageous Official Misconduct in Missouri. If you haven’t read it, please do so now.

As noted in my earlier post, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan has a legal obligation (Missouri Revised Statutes, Section 116.025) to prepare ballot language that is “true and impartial” and that is “neither intentionally argumentative nor likely to create prejudice.” No reasonable person — not even a predictably partisan mainstream editor or reporter — can believe she did that.

For example, the language that the organizers of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative proposed has one central purpose, clearly expressed: to prohibit the state from discriminating against, or granting preferences to, any person or group based on race, gender, or ethnicity. As redefined by Secretary Carnahan, this central purpose is translated, first, to ban “affirmative action” programs “designed to” eliminate discrimination against those groups. But what about other, non-“affirmative action” discriminatory programs, or affirmative action programs “designed” only to promote “diversity”?

Second, Secretary Carnahan’s transforming misrepresentation says absolutely nothing about prohibiting preferential treatment based on race, gender, or ethnicity. Instead, it states that the initiative’s purpose is to eliminate programs “designed to ... improve opportunities for women and minorities.” If this is not partial, argumentative, and prejudiced, what is?

Supporters of the initiative believe eliminating discrimination is a better way to “improve opportunities” for everyone, including minorities and women, than granting race and gender preferences. The initiative is intended to give the citizens of Missouri a chance to decide whether they agree, whether they want their fundamental law to command non-discrimination or race/gender preference as the foundation of the state’s civil rights policy. Secretary Carnahan’s language is a heavy-handed attempt to prevent the people from having that clear choice.

Might the fact that Secretary Carnahan herself supports such discriminatory programs have had an influence on her omission of this central purpose of the initiative?

Is this sort of official contempt for the law, and for basic honesty, so common in Missouri that Secretary Carnahan’s attempt to prevent the citizens of Missouri from having an honest debate over whether they want their state to continue distributing burdens and benefits on the basis of race doesn’t rate extensive coverage in the Missouri press?

So far, the only article on this issue I’ve been able to find is this one, which just appeared in the Kansas City Star, prompted by MissouriCRI’s lawsuit against Carnahan in Cole County Circuit Court.

Note to Missouri editors and reporters: if I’ve missed other articles on Secretary Carnahan’s misconduct or the legal complaint against it, please send me citations and I’ll link to it or them immediately. If in fact you’ve neglected this story, shame on you.

UPDATE [29 July]

Finally, some Missouri papers have reprinted an AP wire story that reprints the Kansas City Star article. See here, here, here, and here.

This is not an impressive performance by the Missouri press.

UPDATE II [30 July]

MoCRI’s legal action against Sec. Carnahan is covered here by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Missouri has always prided itself on being the “Show Me” state. Robin Carnahan, the Missouri Secretary of State, even has a web page explaining the origins of that semi-official sobriquet. Now, however, Ms. Carnahan has given an entirely new meaning to that term: by flagrantly violating her official responsibility, she has shown that Missouri officials need to be shown how to obey their own law.

As Tim Asher, Executive Director of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative, explained today in a press release describing the legal challenge MoCRI has just filed (I’ll provide a link as soon as one is available) objecting to Ms. Carnahan’s extreme makeover of the ballot language it submitted,

Secretary of State Carnahan exercised tremendous liberty in drafting this language. Her directive as outlined by Missouri Statute is to prepare ballot title language that is “true and impartial” and “neither intentionally argumentative nor likely to create prejudice.”

You decide whether she has met that legal obligation.

Here is the language submitted by MoCRI to Secretary of State Carnahan:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to prohibit any form of discrimination as an act of the state by declaring:

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?

Here, by contrast, is what Secretary Carnahan has certified as the official ballot language:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to:

• ban affirmative action programs designed to eliminate discrimination against, and improve opportunities for, women and minorities in public contracting, employment and education; and

• allow preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin to meet federal program funds eligibility standards as well as preferential treatment for bona fide qualifications based on sex?
  

This official dissembling, of course, is not limited to Missouri Democrats. As Mr. Asher stated in the press release,

[m]isleading statements like this ballot title are standard practice for those who support preferences and unequal treatment. They are afraid to let people vote on the true language since the people always choose fair and equal treatment.

Ward Connerly, who has some experience in these matters, was also appalled, stating:

This is one the most appalling abuses of a Constitutional Office I have ever seen. In California, Washington, and Michigan where identical measures have already been passed by the voters, the Secretaries of State and Attorneys General did not play politics with their sworn duty to protect the voting process. I am alarmed and believe the citizens of Missouri should be worried that their duly elected officials are misleading the voters with false and unfair information.

A petition challenging Secretary of State Carnahan’s attempt to undermine the MoCRI has just been filed in Cole County Circuit Court. Perhaps a judge will respond to Ms. Carnahan’s plea to “Show Me” how to perform her duties.

UPDATE

The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative press release quoted above can be now found here. It quotes Section 116.025, Missouri Revised Statutes.

UPDATE II [30 July]

On his new blog, Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, makes the same point that the perceptive Chetly Zarko, who worked on the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, makes in this comment below.

Schmidt’s version:

One prominent higher-education lawyer privately notes that any college affirmative-action program “designed to eliminate discrimination against, and improve opportunities for, women and minorities” in higher education would run afoul of the limits the Supreme Court placed on such policies as far back as its landmark Bakke decision of 1978. The court specifically held in that ruling that colleges cannot use race-conscious admissions policies to remedy societal discrimination. For discrimination to be the justification, it must be discrimination that the college in question perpetrated. In both the Bakke decision and its Grutter v. Bollinger decision of 2003, the only justification for race-conscious admissions allowed by the Supreme Court was the desire to foster levels of racial and ethnic diversity that will provide educational benefits to all students. So, in essence, if the proposed amendment to the Missouri Constitution bans what Ms. Carnahan says it bans, it bans what the Supreme Court says the U.S. Constitution already bans. Any Missouri college that has is operating a program like the ones she describes is vulnerable to lawsuit unless it has admitted to, or has been found guilty of, discrimination against minorities and women.

Allow me to suggest a corollary (or rather to suggest again a corollary I first suggested here): not only would Secretary Carnahan’s language limit the proposed initiative to outlawing programs that are already illegal (an admission, as Zarko suggests, that Missouri has such programs?), but, as I read it, it would not bar any racial or ethnic preference policy that was “designed to” promote diversity.

Does Secretary Carnahan really think that the organizers of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative intend to leave “diversity”-justified racial preference programs untouched? But if she does not think that, what becomes of her legal obligation to certify neutral, unbiased, un-argumentative language? Secretary Carnahan is under no obligation to use the summary language submitted by initiative organizers, but she does have an obligation to summarize fairly and objectively their initiative, not the initiative she would have written or the dumb one she would prefer initiative supporters to have written.

Perhaps the more relevant question is, does Secretary Carnahan think?

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Linn County, Missouri, population 13,754, is in the north-central part of the state. According to this encouraging article in the Linn County News, a large majority of respondents to its recent reader poll oppose racial and gender preferences.

Seventy-one percent of LCL readers responding to the poll “strongly disagree” with the statement “as a hiring and college admissions policy that gives preference to women and applicants of color, the use of affirmative action should be continued.”

Twelve percent “disagree” with that statement, 12 percent were "not sure," and six percent "strongly agree.”

So, the percentage who either “disagreed” or “strongly disagreed,” i.e., who oppose racial and gender preferences, was 83%.

The editor pointed out that “the Linn County Leader received 21 responses to this question,” and thus it would be a mistake to read too much into these results. But it would also be a mistake to read too little into them.

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The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative was launched yesterday at a Kansas City press conference, and, as usual, the press coverage was both instructive and amusing.

Take, for example, the generally well-done article this morning in the Columbia Missourian. It begins:

KANSAS CITY — Missouri opponents of affirmative action announced Tuesday they will launch plans for a November 2008 ballot measure that would ban government-sponsored race and gender preferences in the state.

Because this states, accurately, that the MCRI would “ban government-sponsored race and gender preferences,” the author, Danny Lawhon, can be forgiven for describing the initiative’s supporters as “opponents of affirmative action” when, in fact, they don’t oppose all affirmative action, only those policies based on race, gender, or ethnic preferences.

Less forgivable is the following paragraph:

The proposed initiative would ask voters to ban “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.”

True, the initiative would do that, but that’s only half of what it would do. Here is the complete operative provision, with the Missourian’s omission in italics:

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.

Moving on to the amusing, the University of Missouri’s deputy chancellor believes that racial discrimination is rational and failing to discriminate is irrational. Really.

MU Deputy Chancellor Michael Middleton declined to say what university policies or programs would be at risk should the ballot measure succeed until he and others had examined the language in the initiative. However, Middleton said its passage could result in a “problematic” situation for the university.

“The initiative’s success would inhibit a university in considering relevant factors in decisions they’re charged to make,” he said. “It would certainly be difficult for the people making these decisions to make them rationally. This will certainly be a major debate for the state and the nation this upcoming election. But if that’s what the law would require, then we will comply.”

He added that “MU would not take a political position on the debate over affirmative action.”

However, he encouraged Missourians to give their honest opinions regarding the initiative.

“I think most people in the state understand that our current methods of recruiting, giving aid to, and retaining racially underrepresented groups serve as a great benefit to the university and to the state,” Middleton said. “But I most definitely welcome hearing what the public has to say.”

Here’s a suggestion. If the University of Missouri really wants to hear the public’s “honest opinions” about racial preferences, it can go a long way toward enabling and informing those opinions by releasing complete data on the nature and its extent of its racial preferences and their impact. This would include such information as the grades and test scores of entering students, their average grades while in attendance, and their graduation rates, broken down by race and ethnicity.

Surely the university has this data. If it won’t release it, the citizens of Missouri would be entitled to question the sincerity of the university’s professed desire to hear their “honest opinions.”

Compared to the Missourian’s coverage, the article by the Kansas City Star’s Lynne Franey looks like pure propaganda, beginning with its sub-head, “Anti-affirmative-action group wants Missourians to vote on what it calls preferential treatment.” [Note: this link, initially incorrect, has been fixed.] The lede:

An anti-affirmative-action group wants to have Missouri voters decide on an initiative banning what it calls state-level race-based “preferential treatment” in public contracting, education and employment.

What do you call racial preferences, Ms. Franey? Do you correct the vocabulary of all groups you write about, or only the ones you oppose?

UPDATE

I have just sent the following letter to the editor of the Kansas City Star:

As someone whose counsel was sought by the drafters of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative, I was surprised and disappointed by the blatant editorializing in your news article on its launch ("Race, gender politics at issue," April 25). Or perhaps, following your style, I should say in "what you call news."

Consider the sub-head: "Anti-affirmative-action group wants Missourians to vote on what it calls preferential treatment." And the first paragraph: "An anti-affirmative-action group wants to have Missouri voters decide on an initiative banning what it calls state-level race-based ‘preferential treatment’ in public contracting, education and employment." Yet you managed to quote the NAACP's support of affirmative action without referring with equal snideness to "what it calls affirmative action."

Excuse me, but what would you have us call racial and ethnic preferences if you don't like "preferential treatment"? 

In the future, please keep your editorializing to the opinion pages.

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