The Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, which will appear on this November's ballot as Amendment 46 and reflects a decade long citizen-led effort, prohibits the government from giving preferential treatment or discriminating against any person based on his or her race or gender in public education, public hiring and public contracting. Under current law, government entities, including the University of Colorado, regularly divide candidates based on these characteristics.

Petition circulators for a competing initiative, Initiative 82, are now taking to the streets, spreading outrageous lies; they say our initiative will bring quotas to Colorado and end important outreach programs. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Amendment 46 will make sure that every person -- regardless of race or gender -- has equal access to such programs. It's also important to note that our initiative applies only to public programs; if a private organization wants to create a race or gender-specific program, it can do so. And finally, despite what our opposition may tell you, our initiative maintains important sex-based exceptions. An example: If our initiative passes, our state's current practice of only hiring women to search female prison inmates would be maintained.

The bottom line: Preference programs, advertised as a way to address past discrimination or enhance diversity, are in practice, discriminatory, divisive, and ineffective. In Colorado, disadvantage is clearly tied to geography and economics. We have a serious class-based problem and using race and gender to define disadvantage only distracts us from the larger inequities we face.

We simply cannot define race without getting it wrong. Over the last four decades, we've seen a twenty-fold increase in the number of interracial marriages. How do we define the race of children born to these unions? We cannot define race when an increasing number of students and workers decline to be defined by a single race--now up to about 10 percent--either describing themselves as "other," "multicultural," or as multiple races on government forms. Still more people, about 5 percent, decline to state a race at all.

In Colorado today, we are graduating high school seniors who cannot read or write basic term papers. Nationally, we're losing our competitive edge when it comes to the hard sciences. And most concerning to me, we have college freshmen at CU embarrassingly ignorant about their nation's history and its basic constitutional foundations. It becomes nearly impossible to muster a basic public conversation about rights and equality when too many of us aren't given the tools necessary to understand how we got to where we are today.

When we talk about education reform and leveling the playing field after decades of past discrimination, we must take a progressive new approach -- one that does not discriminate in the name of ending discrimination. It was wrong 50 years ago to segregate lunch counters and drinking fountains, just as today it is wrong to segregate people in admissions, hiring, and contracting.

That's before we get to the fact that when women and minorities are granted admission or awarded jobs based on anything other than our merit, we are inevitably saddled with the false notion that we can't make it on our own. We can and we are.

I first became involved in the effort to bring a ballot initiative like Amendment 46 to Colorado nearly a decade ago. I was a CU student at the time, and as the youngest of four children from a single-parent family, I've always passionately believed that oppression in today's America is almost always a choice. Women have more opportunities than ever -- and in many cases -- more opportunities than men. We don't need the government to spoon feed us equality. We've taken it for ourselves.

Jessica Peck Corry serves as the executive director of the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative (www.ColoradoCRI.org) and as a policy analyst at the Independence Institute, a Golden-based free market think tank.