This week the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Gary, Indiana, charging the city with racial discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. You can read the complaint here.

The story in brief: Gary wanted to hire some Emergency Medical Technicians. It had 25 job applicants. The city drew up a list ranking them from 1 to 25 and said it would offer jobs based on the rankings. It made six offers—to applicants ranked 1st, 5th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th—and the offers were accepted.

Six applicants not offered jobs thought they’d been discriminated against on the basis of race. Why? Because they are white and all of those who were offered and got jobs are black, and the six whites thought there could be no other explanation but race for the city’s decision not to hire, as it said it would, according to the rankings. Each of the six whites (they were ranked 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, and 8th) had a higher rank than the lowest-ranked applicant (the one in the twelfth spot) who got a job. The six complained to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which investigated and found cause to believe that Gary had violated Title VII. The EEOC sent the case to the Civil Rights Division at Justice, which was unable to settle with Gary. Hence the lawsuit.

Which raises a question: Will the Obama Justice Department continue with the case, assuming it has merit? Or will it pull back because it refuses to enforce Title VII in a case of so-called reverse discrimination, maintaining (erroneously) that the law was intended to protect the rights of only blacks and other designated minorities? This case could prove an early test of how Obama intends to enforce the civil rights laws.

Ward Connerly is founder and president of the American Civil Rights Institute. This year, he led efforts to approve ballot propositions banning affirmative action in Colorado and Nebraska. Amendment 46 in Colorado failed with 49 percent of the vote, while Initiative 424 passed in Nebraska with 58 percent of the vote. I recently asked him a few questions about these efforts and his plans for the years to come.

Why do you think Amendment 46 failed in Colorado?

For several reasons. Number one, there were about 13 or 14 initiatives on the ballot, and there was a very well-organized “just say no” campaign that was intended to discourage future ballot initiative proponents from pursuing initiatives by triggering their defeat this time around.

The second issue was the enormous effort that was waged by Senator Obama to get out the vote. He had a lot of money and hired a lot of people who joined forces with some of our opponents, and they walked precincts door to door and they urged people not only to vote for Senator Obama, but while you’re there, also to vote against Amendment 46. If we did not have to run during this Obama year or if we did not have so many initiatives on the ballot, I believe we would have won by 15 points.

The third thing, and this is one that is highly conjectural, is that it appears that many individuals did not fully understand what our initiative was. For example, we lost in a lot of districts that were McCain districts.

Was there anything unique going on in Nebraska that eased passage of Initiative 424?

I think it was just the message. Our message that this was just about fairness, that we have reached the point in Nebraska where we don’t have to worry about treating people differently, and the state motto is equality under the law. Therefore we should live up to our creed and put it in the constitution.

What are the most likely opportunities for success in the next four years for the anti-affirmative action movement?

Given the fact that we now have a self-identified black man as the president of the country, I think it is much more difficult for racial advocates to argue for discrimination. Given that difficulty, it is an excellent time for those of us on my side of the issue to put the nail into the coffin of these policies. So the three states I think are fertile ground for 2010 are Colorado, Arizona, and Missouri. The opposition will have a hard time replicating what they did this year.

There has been a lot of discussion since the election about how conservatives can appeal to minority voters. How do you think the GOP could or should reach out to minority voters, and do you think anti-discrimination initiatives can play a role?

I certainly think we should reach out to everyone. I am not a proponent, however, of trying to reach people on the basis of their color, race, or ethnic background, or circumstances such as that. Once my party starts doing that, it corrupts its own hard-core values. I have seen over the last 10 years enough things the Republican party has done to appear more attractive to blacks and Hispanics that violate the professed beliefs of the party that I shudder at using that kind of tactic.

What does Obama think? That’s a question raised by the Federal Circuit’s decision this week in Rothe Development Corp. v. Department of Defense, which held unconstitutional a federal law that sets aside five percent of defense contracting dollars for businesses owned and controlled by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.” The statute presumes that Black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans are socially disadvantaged and thus eligible for those set-aside dollars. The three-judge panel (two appointed by Reagan, the other by Clinton) found that the racial classifications couldn’t be justified because they lacked what the judges called “a strong basis in evidence.” The government’s case, as the judges saw it, was much too flimsy to support the racially preferential set aside.

The government almost always defends federal laws challenged in court (and so the Bush administration has defended against Rothe’s lawsuit). The Obama administration most likely will continue to defend the five-percent set-aside. But you have to wonder what Obama himself thinks about the presumptions of the statute in question and the weak evidence offered to support this program of race preferences. And you have to wonder about these things not just because of Obama’s background as a law professor but also because of his campaign message about transcending racial division. Isn’t the statute now voided by the Federal Circuit a product of “the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation,” specifically of the “politics that tells us that we have to think, act, and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us”? Obama, who could ask Congress to pass a new statute in this area that does not categorize and prefer, and, yes, discriminate, by race and ethnicity, should be asked about Rothe, which could soon be on its way to the Supreme Court.