AUGUSTA — Affirmative action is “racist and arrogant” and forces employers to hire unqualified people, Rep. Adam Mack said Wednesday in defending his bill to ban preferential hiring in public-sector jobs.

Sally Sutton, executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, countered that affirmative action “brings all Americans into the mainstream as equal competitors.”

The divergent opinions were aired Wednesday during a public hearing before the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee on Mack’s bill to prohibit preferential treatment “by the state and its subdivisions” on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. Opponents said the measure would eliminate affirmative action in the state.

Mack, R-Standish, said the bill was sparked by the hiring and admissions policies at state colleges, which give preference to minorities. In the marketplace or schools, people should be “judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin,” Mack said in a paraphrase of Martin Luther King.

There was a time when “outrageous discrimination” created separate bathrooms for black and white patrons, he said. “Now we are swinging to the other extreme … with diversity celebrated as a worthwhile goal. I am appalled and disturbed at hiring quotas.”

Speaking in favor of the Mack bill before the committee, Lawrence Lockman, chairman of Concerned Maine Families, supported the elimination of preferential hiring practices that have a “poisonous, corrosive influence on American life.”

Lockman said that civil rights laws “have been hijacked by grievance groups whose goal is to seize preferential status based on nothing more than membership in a class of victims. Protected classes in the civil rights statutes have evolved into preferential categories that divide society into favored and disfavored classes of citizens. It has spawned lucrative business opportunities for politically connected social activists,” he said.

These, he said, include state Treasurer Dale McCormick and her partner, Betsy Sweet. “McCormick’s Women’s Unlimited has collected over a million dollars in fees from the state while Sweet’s Moose Ridge Associates is now well into six figures in addition to tens of thousands of dollars in no-bid contracts she has been awarded by the Attorney General’s Office. Nice work if you can get it. We should all be so oppressed and disadvantaged,” Lockman said.

Contacted after the meeting, McCormick said she “went out of my way to do everything by the book” when she was director of Women’s Unlimited, a post she left in 1995. The program has trained women for high-paying jobs in construction and other fields traditionally dominated by men. Sweet was unavailable for comment, but Stephen L. Wessler, chief of the Attorney General’s Public Protection Division, said Sweet developed a civil rights program for state schools and was paid an estimated $10,000 per year for two years. When the program expanded dramatically this year, requests for proposals were sought, a process similar to bids, Wessler said. Because Sweet “did such a remarkably great job,” she was awarded the formal contract, he said.

Associate Professor Jon Reisman of the University of Maine at Machias told the committee that quotas used at the university were “divisive and counterproductive” and included a minority hiring fund used to attract minorities to the system.

UM spokesman Joseph Carr said the Opportunity Hiring Program consists of about $100,000, which is used to hire people “who can provide a unique contribution to the system. That includes national and international experts, not just minorities.”

Reisman said there was no place for such special treatment in Maine. Affirmative action is just another form of discrimination which “puts people in boxes,” he said.

Bill opponents included Marc R. Mutty, director of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, who told the committee that Catholics were the objects of hiring prejudices “not so long ago.” The Mack bill would “outlaw affirmative action which has become a necessary tool in equal opportunity. We must not retreat in our struggle for justice,” Mutty said.

With Maine women earning only 72 percent of what men earn in comparable jobs, the need for affirmative action remains, according to the MCLU’s Sutton. “It’s not preferential treatment. It is a strategy for curing society’s ails,” she said.

Laura Boardman of the Maine Women’s Lobby said the Mack bill “would undermine affirmative action … and create a much rockier playing field. Society still has a long way to go” to eliminate discrimination, she said.

A work session on the Mack bill will be scheduled during March.