Soob

A quote from BAMN chairwoman, Shanta Driver:

“majority white electorate [will] . . . in the privacy of a voting booth . . . vote to uphold and advance white privilege.”

This via Roger Clegg's report on the rather nefarious efforts of BAMN to strike down equal opportunity laws in the name of Affirmative Action. The rub here is that any law that bans preferences on the basis of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc. is a legal roadblock to prospective Affirmative Action laws.

Despite the disgusting commentary on behalf of Shanta Driver, I'll leave out a rant on the tedious double standard regarding race and public commentary... Well, maybe a small digression is in order...

I am "white" and so I am expected to endure the above gross generalization without complaint. I'm to accept the broad label of racist with a grin, a nod or maybe a deep bow of acceptance.
"Yes m'lady, this offending racist accepts your charge with great humility. Damn my bones for being sheathed in white skin for it is not my creed nor my ideology which defines me but the pigment of my cursed hide. And that my cursed hide is white I am guilty eternal, my culture knows no economy nor region nor experience but is defined strictly by my ethnicity and that ethnicity is but a simple parable of repression. I stand guilty, by genetic association, of racism."

There.

That aside, Clegg goes on to describe the means BAMN employs to, essentially, fix the dice:

Step one is to send its “blockers” to wherever petitions are being distributed. Additionally, a hotline is helpfully provided so that tips about people circulating petitions can be forwarded and the blockers dispatched.

Then the real fun begins. Shouting at the people distributing the petitions, lying about what the measure would do, and abusing and defaming everyone who disagrees with them is old hat for the blockers by now. Petty and not so petty assaults follow. Max McPhail, the executive director of the Arizona effort, has noted that BAMN’s tactics have been so far over the top that even the state’s liberal media — no friend of the initiatives themselves — have condemned it.

The latest twist is that BAMN has now been caught on tape trying to bribe the signature-gatherers into turning the collected signatures over to BAMN, presumably so that they can be destroyed. BAMN has also tried secretly to submit bogus signatures itself, so that it can then point to them and challenge the whole effort as defective.

The initiative opponents include both white-collar and blue-collar thugs. The former are, in Colorado, attempting to derail the process by putting on the ballot a counterfeit measure, which looks just like the real thing, except it includes a sentence buried at the end that negates the rest of it.

And the white-collar allies sometimes include government officials. In one state, the petition itself was distorted in its official description (overturned by a court ruling), and later petition circulators were arrested for picketing on public property (such as in front of a public library and on public sidewalks).

Nice. All in the name of equality, mind you...