Support For Initiative 200: Deep, Diverse, Home-Grown -- Michelle Malkin

Initiative 200 debate

The Washington Association of Scholars will host an I-200 debate on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Kane Hall, Room 110, University of Washington.

AVOCADOS. Planet Hollywood. Initiative 200.

Only the first two of these items are California imports. I-200, the Nov. 3 ballot measure that will abolish racial and gender discrimination in state hiring, education and employment, is home-grown. Opponents would have you believe that the desire for equal treatment under the law is an alien commodity - manufactured and paid for, they say, by "out-of-state interests."

But that charge is out of touch with voters and out of step with history.

Rep. Scott Smith, a Republican state legislator from Graham, and Tim Eyman, a small-business owner from Mukilteo, launched the petition drive last year to secure equal treatment under the law in Washington state. Rep. Smith had tried three times since 1995 to convince a skittish, GOP-dominated Legislature to give the measure a hearing in Olympia. Native son John Carlson broke through the political inertia to chair the initiative campaign, and lost his radio talk show earlier this year over his vocal and persistent advocacy of I-200.

Despite a militant "Decline to Sign" campaign designed to block signature-gathering, over 280,000 Washington citizens endorsed I-200 petitions - more than any other initiative drive in state history. The No!200 campaign clings to an extraordinarily scornful view of the electorate, claiming that the vast majority of people who helped put I-200 on the ballot were duped. What opponents neglect to mention is that when they begged citizens to have their names removed from the I-200 petitions, barely two dozen responded.

Who supports I-200? Not big business. Not big government. Not editorial boards. Nor will you find the grass-roots supporters of I-200 at high-powered fund-raisers or "diversity" journalism conferences.

They are too busy raising their families, living their principles, and fighting hard in their own private ways to minimize race-based social engineering in their schools, city halls and state government.

Take I-200 supporter Louise Daw. The single mother from Beacon Hill worked herself off welfare, home-schooled two sons when the public schools proved inadequate, and started her own small business making turbans for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. A sharecropper's daughter, Daw has seen both sides of the racial discrimination coin: "Of course there's discrimination. There always will be." But, she says, the civil-rights movement "wasn't about committing new wrongs to right the old ones."

Democratic state Sen. Mike Heavey, who represents working-class West Seattle, agrees. He bravely bucked party pressure and endorsed I-200 in the state voter's pamphlet because "Two wrongs don't make a right." Heavey is a great admirer of Sen. Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota liberal who was chief sponsor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

"Humphrey was a leader in calling for an end to discrimination, and that's what I-200 does now," Heavey says. "We have institutionalized in our government programs a system that benefits some individuals over others simply because of their race or sex. That's the exact opposite of what the Civil Rights Act intended.

"I've taken a pounding from my Democratic colleagues for supporting I-200," Heavey told me, "but we cannot defeat racism and sexism by engaging in racist and sexist acts."

Janice Moerschel, chair of the Spokane County Libertarian Party, collected about a thousand signatures for I-200.

Candice Jackson Mayhugh, a young college student from Clark County, wrote in an eloquent pro-200 column for the Vancouver Columbian: "If we wish to continue the successful American experiment in true equality under the law, the pendulum of equality must not swing to and fro between forms of discrimination. It must hang still and constant, in unswerving dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal."

And Sharon Atkinson, a 20-year-old junior at the University of Washington, supports I-200 despite personal harassment on campus. "There are people desperately holding onto a power structure built on racial preferences," Atkinson says. "But I think we will prevail because there are too many people in this state who are tired of divisiveness and discrimination."

Grass-roots supporters of I-200 may not all be as smooth as the Kweisi Mfumes and Julian Bonds and Al Gores who have stormed into Washington state to wage war on behalf of the No!200 campaign. Those who are quietly saying yes to I-200 may not be able contribute as much as the National Education Association, People for the American Way, AFSCME and the AFL-CIO - all five-figure, out-of-state donors to No!200.

But what these ordinary Washingtonians do share is a passion for equal treatment under the law - a principle that transcends race, sex or class, and that dates back almost a quarter-century in Washington state.

It was not a California carpet-bagger, but Washington-born Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas who advocated "making decisions on the basis of individual attributes, rather than according a preference solely on the basis of race." The Equal Protection Clause of U.S. Constitution, Douglas forcefully argued, "commands elimination of racial barriers, not their creation to satisfy our theory as to how society ought to be organized."

It is I-200 supporters in Washington state who are heirs to Douglas' progressive tradition, and I-200 opponents who betray it.

Michelle Malkin's column appears Tuesday on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is: malkin1@ix.netcom.com.