Take heart, BAMN targets: The opposite charge is easier to argue. Affirmative action amounts to de facto racism, being based, after all, on racial preferences. Equality before the law is the very essence of the old-time opposition to racism and sexism.

It may interest us to learn that, after the affirmative action standards were made illegal in California, Washington, and Michigan, minority enrollment in colleges at first dipped hard, and then renewed. But, no matter what the statistical results, it's the ethical principle that remains. Our purpose must not be to make people equal — and accept this equality as the "only good result" worth talking about — but to affirm principles that make the still too-common obsession with group affiliation irrelevant. This is the moral high road.

It stands to reason that obsessing about group affiliations — as must any supporter of affirmative action — is no way to end the obsession with group affiliation.

It's about time for Americans to stand up for reason . . . to learn, again, how to discriminate.

Discrimination, remember, is not wrong. Discrimination by irrelevant standards is wrong.

Voters in Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska will have a chance to decide this issue through citizen initiatives placed on their states' ballots this November. They won't express their wills "by any means necessary," they will express them legally, through the democratic process.

I trust they'll vote affirmatively. That is, for equality before the law, which does indeed affirm all — all who would live in peace, freedom and justice.