When you boil it down, the ACLU’s attempt to litigate the City of Anaheim into replacing the at-large system of electing the city council with single-member council districts is really about race; specifically classifying citizens on the basis of their race and designing a system of representation that is based on race.

The ACLU alleges the current system violates the California Voting Rights Act, disenfranchises Latinos and demands increasing the number of Latinos on the council via single-member council districts.

It is clear to anyone who has been paying attention tat the left-wing coalition pushing single-member districts views the world through race-colored glasses. The internal logic of this thinking inevitably leads us to away from the “content of our character” ideal articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr., pushing us backward to absurd spectacle of an increasingly inter-racial society arguing over what someone’s “real” ethnicity is.

And the mangling of color-blindness was on display in these paragraphs from the Voice of OC’s story on yesterday’s decision by Judge Franz Miller to delay hearing the lawsuit until July:

The city challenges the validity of the lawsuit in court documents, arguing that members of minority groups have consistently been elected to the City Council. According to the city, 10 seats have been up for election since 2002, with seven of those seats filled by either “Asian” or “Hispanic” council members.

One of those council members is former Councilwoman Lorri Galloway, who is Spanish and Filipina, a mix that ACLU attorney Robert Ruben said doesn’t meet the criteria for Latina under the Voting Rights Act.

What a sad, infuriating spectacle. But not an unexpected one. When racial bean-counting is the coin of the realm for acquiring political power and “representation,” should we be surprised when such argument breaks out over whether or not someone is really Latino (or Asian or whichever ethnicity is deemed in need of increased “representation)? If single-member council districts become a reality in Anaheim, we can expect more of such demeaning spats.

The argument between Rubin and Galloway over whether she is “really” a Latina is only different from Old South standard of racial purity like the “one-drop rule” in degree, not in kind. At the end of the day, it defines a person’s identity for purposes of representation by accident of birth, not by their beliefs. The only other Western nation I can think of that structured representation in government based on racial considerations was apartheid South Africa.

The significant and ever-increasing rate of racial inter-marriage is rapidly making the racial bean-counting inherent in CVRA obsolete. According to a 2012 Pew Research Center study, more than 23% of recent marriages are inter-ethnic — a percentage that is only going to grow.

I’m white and my wife is from Mexico. Are our daughters white? Or are they Latinas? if we consider them 50-50, do we use the relative lightness or darkness of their complexions as an ethnic identity tie-breaker?

It’s OK for a Latino to marry a non-Latino, but not OK to be represented in government by a non-Latino?

At the heart of the ACLU lawsuit and the push for single-member council districts  is the pernicious notion that ultimately, citizens can only be truly represented by members of their own ethnic or racial group. This notion is contrary to both the philosophy on which this country was funded, and to the demographic realities of California. It’s time for anyone fooling themselves into thinking this is about better representation to wise up.