Affirmative action, as its name implies, is the use of factors like race or gender (or sexual orientation) to use affirmative (that is, favoritive) criteria in selection. Examples are usiing race or gender as a tiebreaker, giving someone extra points when using a point scale for being a member of a favored class, or the rightfully maligned quotas. It is much more than prohibiting the use of those criteria, and is in fact the affirmative use of that criteria.
Whether that's good or bad, I'll leave up to you. In either case, this is most decidedly NOT affirmative action being discussed here.
From Wikipedia (which I would never site in a legal brief, but is good enough for discussions on the interwebs): Affirmative action (known as positive discrimination in the United Kingdom and as employment equity in Canada and elsewhere) refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin"[1] into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group "in areas of employment, education, and business".[