The man behind Prop 209: Ward Connerly's latest crusade challenges the easy assumptions about him.

• Author: Freedberg, Louis
• Position: Support for domestic-partner benefits

Ever since Ward Connerly emerged as a leader in the fight to end affirmative action, he has had to fend off a stream of insults that might have sunk someone with a thinner skin.

Uncle Tom. House slave. Puppet of the white man. Traitor to his race. Minority counterrevolutionary. These are just some of the labels Connerly's many critics in California and around the nation have hurled in his direction. But none prepared the Sacramento businessman and regent of the University of California for the vitriol unleashed by his support last November for the university's proposal to extend health benefits to partners of its gay employees. The reaction, he say has been even more extreme than the one prompted by his crusade against affirmative action, or as Connerly prefers to call it, racial preferences. "On race, at least you can sit down and talk with people," says Connerly, who led the successful campaign in support of Proposition 209, the initiative banning affirmative action programs in California. "Blacks will get in your face and get angry with you, but the level of debate doesn't begin to compare with this one. People start talking about morals, the Bible, degenerates, and before you know it, you're off in a terrible debate in which you just can't reason with people."

Until the university's vote last fall, Connerly had been routinely vilified by supporters of affirmative action (mostly left-of-center Democrats) -- and virtually canonized by affirmative action critics (mostly right-of-center Republicans). But his support for domestic-partner benefits has begun to erode the one-dimensional views each side may have held of him.

The Gathering Storm

It is only in the last few years of this decade that domestic-partner benefits have become a ubiquitous part of the American workplace. In 1982 the Village Voice became the first employer to offer these benefits to its gay employees; by 1990 fewer than a half dozen more employers had joined the alternative news weekly. Today, however, such benefits are offered by hundreds of universities (including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford), local governments (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles), and private employers (Microsoft, Shell Oil, Wells Fargo Bank).

The University of California, however, had lagged far behind not only other leading employers in the state, but most comparable universities as well. Richard Atkinson, the university's president, told the board of regents that the lack of domestic partner benefits had "affected its ability to recruit and retain the most qualified faculty, staff, and graduate students."

In the months leading up to the regents' tumultuous meeting, Connerly emerged as an unlikely champion of the benefits package. It passed by a razor-thin 13-12 margin. Gay rights advocates were ecstatic because...