FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tuesday April 24, 2007

CONTACT: TIM ASHER (816) 812-4929

The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative is forging ahead with plans for a November, 2008 ballot measure banning government-sponsored race and gender preferences in the state. The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative will be part of a 'Super Tuesday' campaign that will offer citizens of several states the chance to end such practices in public employment, public education and public contracting. Similar measures have already passed in three other states, all by overwhelming margins.

Missouri Civil Rights Initiative's Tim Asher, former director of admissions as North Central Missouri College said such a measure has never been more necessary. "Efforts to assure equal opportunity in Missouri are admirable," notes Asher, whose contract at the state school was not renewed after he raised questions about the college's preferential admissions policies, "but discriminating against some in favor of others is not the answer. That only perpetuates unfairness and ill feeling. We are individuals and should not be reduced to stereotypes - especially by our government."

Also attending the press conference, to be introduced by Honorary Missouri Civil Rights Initiative Chairman John Uhlmann, will be Ward Connerly, chairman of the Sacramento-based American Civil Rights Institute. A longtime crusader for a colorblind America, Connerly has been invited by Missouri Civil Rights Initiative to help with the campaign. "Getting our nation to the point of applying a single standard to all Americans is one of the most crucial issues of our time," says Connerly, who helped lead the earlier successful anti-preferences campaigns in California, Washington state and, most recently, Michigan. "If events of the past couple of weeks have taught us anything at all, it is that race will continue to divide our nation as long as we insist on treating people differently based on ethnicity and gender. Both Don Imus, in his appalling comments on the Rutgers women's basketball team, and those who rushed to judgment in the Duke lacrosse case made the same mistake: they looked at individuals and saw only skin color. We have to get past that kind of thinking - and we must start by putting our government out of the business of privileging some citizens based on the color of their skin or the origin of their ancestors and punishing others. Real lives have been radically affected by these policies, and great social and economic damage has been done."

The language of the proposed ballot initiative reads as follows: "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."

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