EARLIER THIS week, as Congress debated extending key provisions of the Patriot Act, libertarian Senator Rand Paul took up the mantle of principled opposition.
“Your right to be left alone” by the government, Paul said in an impassioned speech from the Senate floor, “is the most cherished of rights.” We Americans fought a “revolution,” he said, to stop the kind of spying that is conducted by the National Security Agency.
This kind of rhetoric has become the norm in the two years since Edward Snowden leaked the NSA’s classified secrets — in particular, the revelation that the government was collecting bulk phone records of Americans. “The government is taking away our privacy rights . . . shredding the Constitution,’’ so the arguments go.
Let’s put aside the fact that there is virtually no evidence that Americans’ privacy rights have been violated, or the fact that Americans are so unbothered by the government collecting their metadata that 60 percent of them want to see it continue, or even that the government might possibly be a more responsible steward of this material than telecom companies.
The real disconnect in Paul’s war for the “right to be left alone” is his own hypocrisy. Paul thinks the government should leave you alone, unless you are a gay person who wants to enjoy the same rights of marriage that heterosexual Americans enjoy. He wants to keep the government out of your business, unless you are a woman who wants full control over her body and her reproductive rights. For Paul, the right to privacy ends where a woman’s biology begins.
