"Some people are taking this [Rachel Maddow] interview as proof that [Rand Paul is] a racist, that he supports discrimination. Now I don’t know if Rand Paul is racist. I don’t think this interview proves that he supports racism, but it does prove his ideal government just happens to be one that would open lots of door for racism and make discrimination of all kinds easier than it is now.
Does that prove that he’s some hard-core racist that doesn’t care about black people? No, but it does suggest he’s such a hard-core, purist libertarian that he cares more about this abstract set of principles than he cares about any actual people. That he’s more committed to these rigid abstractions than he is to protecting the basic rights of human beings in the real world. And if that’s the case, that means that this Civil Rights Act thing is just the tip of the iceberg.Rand, who is against politics as usual, gives answers which are Southern politics as usual. He says he is not a racist, but is for a system that would allow racism. It's the race card that Lee Atwater and Karl Rove perfected. You can't say "n*gger, n*gger, n*gger" in the South, so you use a coded language. Opposing the Equal Rights laws resonates with his hick constituents.
That means there’s a whole lot of situations that where, if Rand Paul has to describe his beliefs in detail, his beliefs are going to sound really weird and alienating. And I think Rand Paul knows that, and that’s why he trying so hard not to describe his own beliefs in plain English."
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Sorry, but saying there ought to be discussion about whether federal civil rights laws should be applied to private businesses does not equate to being a racist.
Do you know that the vast bulk of "civil rights" lawsuits that are actually brought in modern America. have nothing to do with race? Although plaintiffs will jam every possible allegation of discrimination in their complaints, in 2009, according to the website of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, 65 percent of all civil rights claims brought had absolutely nothing to do with race discrimination.
These days, a typical federal "civil rights" case is the one brought this year by the Game Fowl Breeders Association in New Mexico claiming their "civil rights" have been violated by a state law banning cockfighting.
Another modern "civil rights" lawsuit charged that a McDonald's restaurant violated the Americans With Disabilities Act by hanging a bathroom mirror two inches too high for people in wheelchairs. The error was made when employees replaced the original mirror, which had been destroyed by vandals, with a shorter one. The restaurant owner, Ron Piazza, corrected the problem as soon as it was brought to his attention, but he got sued anyway.
And of course there are all the lesbians shutting down high school proms across the country because they can't take their girlfriends to the dance as the Founding Fathers intended.
This year's graduating class at Itawamba Agricultural High School in rural Mississippi will never have a school senior prom because the ACLU brought a lawsuit on behalf of Constance McMillen demanding that she be allowed to bring her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo.
With cockfighting bans and heterosexual proms, Martin Luther King's work remains unfinished!
The question is not whether the federal government should be telling private businesses they can't engage in race discrimination. The question is whether federal civil rights laws should prevent any discrimination other than race discrimination.
But instead of addressing Rand Paul's argument, you simplemindedly insinuate that he must be a racist. Don't you know that playing the race card is the tactic of those unwilling to make arguments on the merits?
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