Women’s Issues Added to Debate on Affirmative Action : Ballot: Seeking to rally bipartisan opposition, coalition says proposed initiative would legitimize sex discrimination. Backers say it would maintain equal protection.

Seeking to broaden opposition to a proposed state constitutional amendment that would strike down affirmative action programs, a coalition of women’s and minority groups is warning that the measure could be used to support widespread discrimination against women and girls.

At a news conference in Los Angeles today, the proposal’s opponents will argue that a little-publicized clause in the “California civil rights initiative” could bar women from nontraditional jobs and allow schools to favor boys’ programs over girls’ programs.

The national YWCA will also announce today that it is joining the campaign against the initiative, marking the first time in its 176-year history that it has taken sides in a political campaign. The organization’s 30 California offices will form the backbone of the anti-initiative field operation.

In a demonstration of the kind of bipartisan opposition they will need to defeat the measure, the opponents are highlighting the views of Republican women business owners who consider the proposed initiative a death knell for their businesses.

“It literally licenses discrimination against women and girls where it has never been permitted in the laws until now,” said Katherine Spillar, national coordinator for the Feminist Majority. “We could go back to the not-so-distant past where women were held out of police and firefighting jobs and girls were kept out of sports programs.”

One of the GOP women who has joined the opposition to an initiative her party supports is Martha Diaz Aszkenazy, who has owned a San Fernando construction firm for 15 years. Her business has grown, she said, because affirmative action programs forced biased project managers to consider her for work.

“If it weren’t for affirmative action, I would have been out of business a long time ago,” said Diaz Aszkenazy, whose company grossed $8 million this year. “The law hasn’t changed yet and people are already relaxing,” she said.

University of California Regent Ward Connerly, who spearheaded the UC system’s reversal of affirmative action programs and recently took over leadership of the financially troubled initiative effort, scoffed at the accusations leveled by the women’s groups.

“This is a red herring,” he said. “The only way they think the CCRI can be defeated is if they drive women from men and incite the fears of women.”

State and national polls show that while men are more supportive than women of cutting back affirmative action, there has yet to be the full-scale breach between the genders on which the initiative’s opponents are counting. Opponents of the measure have long believed that if they are to defeat it, they will have to rally women--particularly white women--to their side.

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The initiative, being prepared for the November ballot, would ban either preferential treatment or discrimination toward 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.”

Practically speaking, it would prohibit state and local governments from invoking everything from informal outreach programs that seek to draw qualified women and minorities to bid on state contracts to the more rigid efforts of public universities and schools to accept women or minorities. Gov. Pete Wilson and the state Republican Party are strongly behind the measure, and it formed part of the rationale for Wilson’s sundered presidential campaign.

At issue now is the third clause in the initiative, which reads, “Nothing in this section shall be interpreted as prohibiting bona fide qualifications based on sex which are reasonably necessary to the normal operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”

Like everything else connected to the proposed initiative, the intent of that sentence and the way it would be interpreted by the courts are the subject of angry dissent.

Opponents of the initiative contend that the so-called “clause C” would allow any government agency to declare women ineligible for certain jobs or programs.

They suggest that women could, for example, be barred from jobs as firefighters or heavy equipment operators under the theory that they lack the strength to do the job. Or, they say, schools facing financial crises could decide to cut girls’ athletic programs and leave money-making boys’ programs in place.

Currently, women in California are protected by the state constitution’s equal protection clause, which bars such bias in state education and contracting. Bias in employment is allowed only if it solves a “compelling need.”

What the CCRI would do, said NAACP western regional counsel Molly Munger, “is replace that incredibly strict standard that protects women against discrimination, and turn it into a very loose, very vague, very dangerous new standard.”

“What they are trying to do is take away something that women have achieved in California,” she said.

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A legal advisor for the initiative’s sponsors, however, paints a very different picture of the impact of the clause.

Eugene Volokh, an acting law professor at UCLA, said the clause was included in an effort to keep the initiative in line with existing law and allow exceptions for those compelling needs that the courts already recognize.

The clause, he says, “says that ‘nothing shall be interpreted as prohibiting (sex-based qualifications).’ It doesn’t say these things are permitted.

“If the equal protection clause prohibits it, it stays prohibited,” he added. “The equal protection clause has its own independent force.”

Volokh added that federal law would also protect women against undue discrimination. However, the initiative’s sponsors have made clear that they hope to follow the California measure with a federal twin, leaving open the possibility that federal protections could be affected.

The initiative effort has encountered rocky fortunes since earlier this year, when it appeared to be a cinch to make the ballot. In recent weeks, the measure’s former campaign manager detailed its financial foundering, and he later resigned.

A prominent Republican with ties to the initiative effort said that Connerly, a black businessman and Wilson appointee to the UC regents, took over the campaign with the understanding that more than $500,000 would be donated to the cause by party donors and that Wilson would volunteer some political staffers to help shepherd it onto the ballot.

Connerly said in an interview that since he came aboard, about $500,000 has been raised from donors, including big GOP givers. That will allow proponents to complete the signature-gathering effort by late February, he said.

As for Wilson forwarding political aides to the effort, Connerly said that although nothing is formalized, “I would suspect he would.” He said he is already receiving informal political advice from Wilson colleagues who are friends of his.