By Matthew Holloway |
The Queen Creek Town Council unanimously passed Resolution #1611-24 this week in a bid to push back on ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ or ‘DEI’ practices, which serve to discriminate against people based upon race and gender.
As reported by The Heritage Foundation, the council voted Wednesday on the new ordinance that will prohibit town tax dollars from being spent on any policies advancing the inherently discriminatory practices.
Queen Creek Councilman Travis Padilla said, “In Queen Creek, we want to focus on things that unite us like individual success and achievement, not things that divide us like political ideology.” He observed at the council meeting that the new ordinance will allow the city’s officials to target equal opportunities rather than artificially constructed equal outcomes.
In the text of the revised ordinance, the town states, “It is the policy of the Town Council that all recruitment and selection decisions for Town employment are based on merit.” The new law adds to the Equal Opportunity Employment ordinance that it is “the Town’s intention to (…) Not compel an applicant or employee to endorse any statement that provides preferential treatment to or discriminating against any individual as a condition of hire, promotion or transfer,” and “Not require nor support any affirmative action policies or practices.”
The new ordinance further goes on to prohibit the central tenets of DEI, “Training programs, workshops, and educational materials that are specific to and explicitly promote (…)
- Any form of racial or gender superiority or inferiority.
- Assigning guilt, blame, or responsibility to individuals based on their race or gender, such as unconscious bias, cultural appropriation, micro aggressions, or any related concepts.
- Any content that promotes division or animosity among employees based on race, color, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, identity, or any other characteristic.”
Although the town “acknowledges that there will be external training and education classes that may address prohibited content topics as part of an overall conference, workshop or college level course,” the policy makes clear that ”the Town will refrain from conducting internal classes or workshops that are exclusively focused on those specific topics.”
The revision of the city’s personnel policy also included updates to the recruitment and selection process to make them explicitly “merit-based.”
As noted by Austin VanDerHeyden, the Director of Municipal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute, the development in Queen Creek comes only a few months after Goldwater exposed the Town of Gilbert for its mandated DEI training for all new hires, occurring unbeknownst to citizens and town councilmembers alike.
VanDerHeyden observed in a release from the Goldwater Institute, “Queen Creek stands in stark contrast to the localities like Gilbert who have fully embraced divisive and dangerous ideologies on the taxpayers’ dime.”
He added that the policy enacted by Queen Creek is “a hallmark of Goldwater’s work to dismantle DEI across the country,” observing that diversity statements along these lines have been used as litmus tests in other towns “for ideological alignment, screening out candidates who do not adhere to specific progressive ideologies.”
He concluded, “It’s welcome news that Queen Creek has decided to stand apart among Arizona municipalities in promoting merit-based hiring practices, while keeping divisive and corrosive DEI policies and trainings out of the town. This is a huge win for the residents of the town, who can now be confident that their elected officials and town staff are focusing on actual town business, not obsessing about identity politics like so many of their neighboring communities have been doing for far too long.”
Matthew Holloway is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow him on X for his latest stories, or email tips to Matthew@azfreenews.com.
