Archive for Blockers

Signature Blockers, Part 2

Signature blockers, also known as petition blockers, thrive on preventing citizens from reading and signing petitions for state ballot initiatives. Tactics range from talking over signature takers to insulting them to following them around, and worse.
The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, & Immigration Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) is an expert in signature blocking.

Max McPhail, director of the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative (AzCRI), which recently failed, talked about what happened to him at one petition gathering effort. BAMN blockers accused him of being a self-hater. McPhail is a racial minority, and in the eyes of those who believe blacks should be held to lower standards, any minority who disagrees must hate himself. McPhail told Capitol Media Services that a new initiative campaign to end preferences in government hiring, contracting, and admissions will begin in Arizona after the November election.

Signature blocking is an egregious and unethical effort to keep citizens from exercising their rights as citizens. Perversely, blockers really think they’re protecting citizens. That’s true only if you consider people sheeple, blindly following the pack without the intelligence to make informed decisions about what they believe. BAMN chairperson Shanta Driver said this about the failure of AzCRI:

“BAMN’s fraud-blockers prevented Connerly from obtaining petition signatures by lying to qualified voters about the aim and effect of the initiative, so he was forced to resort to outright forgery and fraud.”

Driver believes ACRI is defrauding voters, so BAMN’s solution is to resort to preventing those same voters from getting information to make the decision for themselves.

What a proud moment in the history of civil rights!

Check out the YouTube channel EndRacePreferences

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Signature Blockers

They’re loud and rude. They’re called signature blockers, people who seek to prevent others from reading and signing petitions to add civil rights initiatives to state ballots. As the video below shows, some want to prevent voters from even hearing about anti-preference initiatives.

I’ll write more about signature blockers next week. For now, think about what it must have been like during the civil rights movement. People feared the idea of equality before the law for everyone, regardless of skin color. They broke laws and violated constitutional rights to keep racial minorities from voting. It’s 2008, and some still fear the concept of equality before the law. Like their predecessors, they’re not above trying to intimidate.

It’s shameful.

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