The Colorado Council of Churches today announced its opposition to Amendment 46, a ballot measure aimed at ending preferential treatment by the state based on individuals’ or groups’ race, sex, color or ethnicity.
The council’s executive director, Rev. Jim Ryan, said the measure to end affirmative action in college admissions and programs, and in public contracts and employment, is an attack on equal opportunity for Colorado women and people of color.
If Amendment 46 passes, Ryan said, it would, among other things, eliminate science and math tutoring programs for young women as well as other efforts to close the gender gap in pay.
“Progress has been made in overcoming the effects of centuries of discrimination against women and people of color, but we are not there yet. As people of faith, we feel called to stand with them,” Ryan said in announcing the council’s position.
The stated mission of the council, a coalition of about a dozen liberal Protestant congregations, is the “manifestation of Christ’s work of reconciliation, a sign of hope to a world divided by the sins of alienation, oppression, racism and pride.”
Amendment proponent Jessica Peck Corry said the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative Committee seeks equal treatment for all citizens regardless of race or color.
“It doesn’t get much more biblical than that,” Peck Corry said. “This initiative will not eliminate a single program that is open and available to anyone who needs it. Our goal is to let every kid who wants to go to college achieve that.”
Ryan said there is a gender gap in pay, and laws and programs meant to redress past inequities still have work to do.
According to last year’s study by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, one year out of college, women working full time earned only 80 percent of their male colleagues’ pay. The gap worsened after 10 years in the workplace, the foundation said, when the average pay for women was 69 percent of that earned by men in the same positions.
The pro-amendment committee holds that racial and gender preferences have not only harmed better-qualified white and Asian students and candidates, but have hurt some Latino and African-American students by placing them in programs for which they were ill prepared.
The Sacramento, Calif.-based American Civil Rights Coalition, the national movement to end states’ affirmative-action programs, has helped bankroll the local committee. Its founder, Ward Connerly, is a prosperous and conservative African-American Republican.
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
