Rand Paul's Civil Rights Act Comments Revisited

[bobbyw24]

It has already become a cliche on the right to tut-tut at U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul's "rookie" mistake of trying to conduct a "libertarian seminar" during the campaign.

I'm not so sure. For starters, if you're not invested in Paul's political career, why not seize this rare opportunity for one of those eternally sought but never achieved "national conversations" on race?

Besides, Paul's not going to lose because of his reservations about some aspects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He's from Kentucky, a very red state. And contrary to what you might suspect from reading the national media, not only has he not made repealing the law the centerpiece of his campaign, he has no desire to do so if elected.

Indeed, it's worth noting that the only people who are really jazzed to reopen the argument about the Civil Rights Act are liberals.

And they have good reason: They won that argument, politically and morally. This is a fact liberals never stop reminding us, and themselves, about. Like a paunchy middle-aged man who scored the winning touchdown in the high school championship, nostalgic liberals don't need an excuse to bring up their glory days (which were not the Democratic Party's glory days, by the way). Give them a living, breathing politician who suggests, no matter how imprecisely or grudgingly, that the Civil Rights Act wasn't perfect, and they'll talk your ear off like a drunk uncle at a wedding.

How many activist groups insist that their plight is sublimely analogous to the civil rights struggle? How many times did the Democrats try to make health-care reform a continuation of civil rights? "When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) intoned as he tried to ram health-care reform through, "some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."

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http://townhall.com/columnists/Jona...and_pauls_civil_rights_act_comments_revisited

 

[rprprs]

I'm about ready to pull my hair out by the roots.

Can NO ONE, on either side of this argument, present their case without resorting to hyperbolic overstatement?! (and, yeah, I know that's redundant).

Paul weeps for the lost right of white businessmen to refuse black customers...

Weeps?!!! WEEPS!, for Christ's sake.

It's no wonder the author comes to his final conclusion.

...it's certainly repugnant and bizarre for libertarians like Paul to lament the lost rights of bigots rather than to rejoice at the restored rights of integrationists.

Ugh!!! And that's all I'm going to say about articles like this in the future. They're not worth further dissection.

(Bobby..this is no reflection on your posting. I appreciate you bringing these articles to light.)

 

[jmdrake]

More crap from this article:

But he fails to appreciate the perverse irony that one of Jim Crow's greatest evils was its intrusion on the property rights of whites. Jim Crow wasn't merely some "Southern tradition" undone by heroic good government. Jim Crow laws were imposed by government. And they banned white businessmen from serving blacks (Plessy vs. Ferguson, which enshrined "separate but equal" in the Constitution for another six decades, was largely about how blacks could be treated on railroads).

Rand Paul said that he fully supported 9 out of 10 of the titles of the civil rights act! He also said he would have tried to "reword" (as opposed to repeal) title 2. The other 9 titles destroy the "Jim Crow" laws! How is that "failing to understand" the perverseness of Jim Crow? This coming from a so called "conservative" website is quite interesting. It's a full court press now against Rand Paul. He distanced himself from his dad's anti war position so they can attack him there. Instead they're piling on the "he's a racist" bandwagon. This fight isn't about the "right to discriminate" or even "property rights". It's about how far can the federal government go in the name of "fixing" social ills and what mechanism can they use to do this and what are the limitations (if any) of that mechanism.