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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Before the state of Michigan set back civil rights with the passage of Proposal 2, the affirmative action ban, in November 2006, it set back civil rights with the other Proposal 2, which banned gay marriage, in 2004. Almost 3 years later, we are dealing with the aftermath. Last week, the Michigan Court of Appeals declared that under the marriage ban, same-sex domestic partners are ineligible for benefits from public employers. This reversed an earlier decision by a lower court, which affirmed the right of same-sex couples to continue to receive benefits post-Prop 2. Countless government, public college and university employees now have their futures hanging in limbo.
Things are getting rough out in my home state...I wish I could say I didn't run away from it all, but I did.
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Your association of a fundamentally liberal, anti-racist cause of 2006's Prop 2 with the despicable denial of fundamental civil rights to gay Americans in 2004 is completely wrongheaded.
2004's prop 2 needs to be defeated by any means available to us - if the courts decide it's legally sound, then we need to defeat it at the ballot box.
I'm firmly against affirmative action as well. But I think that the elephant in the room that never seems to be analysized is the fact that the bush adm. has cut--drastically--federal expenditures on financial aid loans and Pell--grants. We've effectively cut opportunity not ambition here.
The notion that we-as taxpayers--are being ripped off is more spin than fact. Financial aid Loans are just that....loans.......loans to be paid back.
Therefore when one considers the worst possible scenerio, it reflects upon the student, the individual student. And given the sky-rocketing interest rates that the GOP has supported in the past reveals the fact that the upper 1% will continue to enjoy tax cuts while students continue to be fleeced without exception.
There's this idea that anybody who disagrees with the administration's cuts in education will be given a free ride that is funded by us the tax-payers.......There's the notion that we'll only be putting people into college that don't even want to be there.
The idea behind not letting a black man into a college is "racist," for obvious reasons. The idea of giving a historically subjected race a boost is exactly not racist. Instead it is the acknowledgment of the effects of racism. So affirmative action isn't even close to racist on the conceptual level. As for the real world, you'd have to make the case that racism in admission, as well as institutional racism more broadly, no longer has a significant effect on minorities. To my knowledge no one has even made a a serious effort to do this, demonstrating an apparent utter lack of understanding of what affirmative action is for.
As for the "completely wrongheaded" association of the two proposals, I think that was totally straightforward, but I'll explain it. On the one hand, Ashwini was using a literary device as a platform for discussion, namely that both proposals are "Proposal 2." Other than that this obvious linkage is that they both relate to discrimination issues. Even you think they both relate to discrimination issues. You just evidently don't think racism in admissions and the education system otherwise exists, with zero evidence. So you disagree with her conclusion, which is predicated on the apparently radical belief that minorities and women in the United States just might have a somewhat more difficult time in our culture.