Seattle City Council Defines Equality

An email I received earlier today from Seattle City Councilman Richard McIver contained the following:

American society is still short of offering full equality to women, people of color, sexual minorities, and the disabled.

In unrelated news, by way of Sound Politics, the Seattle PI has an article titles If it's under $241,000, Seattle's a no-bid city, which contains the following from... wait for it.. Councilman McIver:

Thanks to Seattle's relatively loose rules governing who gets several hundred million dollars in contracts each year, McIver needed only the council president's blessing to grant the contract to his allies.

He didn't have to advertise the opportunity, didn't have to allow others to compete for it and didn't have to comply with a voter-approved ban against giving special preference to firms owned by racial minorities.

"They can do the job well. And I wanted to use a minority (-owned) firm,"

I guess it all depends on how you define "full equality".