Even people not bothered by his position allowing discrimination are bound to react badly to his dodging a question for a whole interview and then trying to pretend his position is different from what it clearly was. He looks like simultaneously a dodger, flip-flopper, and extremist. Just one day after the primary, wow.
See a comment here. As I said as he was speaking, this was the worst part of it for me. You can see what got him in trouble on the Rachel Maddow show here and here (legal analysis of his confusion), various analysts focusing on his views. And, that's fine. But, his refusal to be upfront about them should get more emphasis. It's connected as well since it is typically how horrible views continue -- they are believed and accepted, but not truly brought out in the open. In fact, when they are, the people who try to do so are blamed:
"I think what you've done is you bring up something that really is not an issue, nothing I've ever spoken about or have any indication that I`m interested in any legislation concerning," Paul told Maddow near the end of their long discussion about the Civil Rights Act. "So, what you bring up is sort of a red herring or something that you want to pit. It's a political ploy. I mean, it's brought up as an attack weapon from the other side, and that's the way it will be used."
Rand willingly came on Maddow's show, early (by some accounts) in effect announcing his candidacy there as well. He is supposedly to be respected as an independent voice, someone running against the establishment candidate. Yes, we might not some of his views, but like his dad, we should be happy he honestly stands by them, some of which can have cross-party support. This would include the opposition to so many foreign wars, though some suggest he is toning that down at tad.
Instead, he can't answer direct questions (basic questions about seminal pieces of legislation are mere "abstract" matters anyways -- aren't libertarians and such all for first principles?) and instead whines that it all as "politics" and gotcha journalism from the left. So f-ing lame. A real worthwhile candidate would be willing to be upfront about and debate their views. Query: okay, you mostly support the Civil Rights Act, so if your attempts to try to modify them failed, would you have voted for it? (After all the noise, he finally said "yes") Would you have supported a filibuster? What does regulation of public accommodations have to do with firearms, anyways?
"Well, there's 10 -- there's 10 different -- there's 10 different titles, you know, to the Civil Rights Act, and nine out of 10 deal with public institutions and I'm absolutely in favor of," he told Maddow deep in their 15-minute interview. "One deals with private institutions, and had I been around, I would have tried to modify that."
Maddow -- getting annoyed at his filibustering and avoidance tactics -- finally asked "yes or no" as to keeping blacks from Woolworths lunch counters. Again, he was all about how he wouldn't support such businesses (blah blah) but if you are against that you in effect are supporting micromanaging all private business, including (bugaboo time!) their right to have guns. Is this some guns in Starbucks deal? Anti-discrimination laws are still around, the current issue sexual orientation. And, if strong beliefs honestly defended isn't his thing, what is the point of electing the guy?
The basic premise is off, clearly, but he doesn't really want to talk about it, apparently. Justice Douglas once noted that a business (often subsidiaries of big corporations) is not the same thing as a private home:
But a restaurant, like the other departments of this retail store where Negroes were served, though private property within the protection of the Fifth Amendment, has no aura of constitutionally protected privacy about it. Access by the public is the very reason for its existence.
Yes, it is still in some form "private property," but the thing is that all property is regulated, particularly public businesses. "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it." They are deeply regulated by the state, and just as racial covenants cannot be upheld in the courts, racial discrimination in this context is the state supported discrimination Paul says he is wholeheartedly against. The first Justice Harlan knew this back in 1883:
In every material sense applicable to the practical enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment, railroad corporations, keepers of inns, and managers of places of public amusement are agents or instrumentalities of the State, because they are charged with duties to the public, and are amenable, in respect of their duties and functions, to governmental regulation. It seems to me that, within the principle settled in Ex parte Virginia, a denial, by these instrumentalities of the State, to the citizen, because of his race, of that equality of civil rights secured to him by law, is a denial by the State, within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. If it be not, then that race is left, in respect of the civil rights in question, practically at the mercy of corporations and individuals wielding power under the States.
The Supreme Court never overturned The Civil Rights Cases, which held a 1875 civil rights act against discrimination in public accommodations was an improper use of congressional power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 therefore used a back-up approach: regulation of interstate commerce, which the Supreme Court upheld though Douglas and Goldberg noted Harlan's approach was perhaps better. Again, it was not merely "private" but the regulation of the economy. Douglas again:
Business, such as this restaurant, is still private property. Yet there is hardly any private enterprise that does not feel the pinch of some public regulation -- from price control, to health and fire inspection, to zoning, to safety measures, to minimum wages and working conditions, to unemployment insurance. When the doors of a business are open to the public, they must be open to all, regardless of race, if apartheid is not to become engrained in our public places. It cannot, by reason of the Equal Protection Clause, become so engrained with the aid of state courts, state legislatures, or state police.
Justice Harlan -- as discussed by Justice Goldberg's opinion in Bell v. Maryland* (a sit-in case) -- noted that the right to equally be served in public businesses is a "civil" right. It is not a "social" right alone, the argument of Rand Paul. Both Douglas and Goldberg in various opinions underlined that the responsibility of "common carriers" to serve the public equally has a long history. Justice Harlan's argument is that Congress surely has the power (mixed with the responsibility) to apply that rule to prevent racial discrimination. If "[t]here is one, if there be no other" right given by the Fourteenth Amendment, it was the right to be go to a public business without being stopped because of one's race (broadly understood to include one's nationality or even one's religious faith).
The other two justices went a step further -- even without congressional legislation, a state had no power to allow otherwise, enforcement of racial discrimination in public accommodations not "neutral" but illegitimate state action. Original understanding was somewhat mixed on that, but Goldberg provides some signs that it can be deemed loyal even by that rubric. They note that legislative action was not the only way racial discrimination was allowed -- common law, legal custom and executive action also did the trick. It is naive to suggest segregation was "voluntary," given social custom, but governmental action also popped up all over.
So, Rand and libertarians in general cannot not confuse the Civil Rights Act with invasion of private associations or the right of people to be hateful. Public businesses are not private associations. The line drawing here can be complicated, including when dealing with large business associations or the specifics of discrimination laws. I'm sure lots of interesting stuff about regulations of business (including labor law) can be imagined. But, basic points can be settled. This includes basic understandings of historical events that simply are not that long ago.
I can respect but strongly oppose people with views that are simply wrong or misguided at best. But, they have to be willing to honestly discuss them with some degree of skill. Or, I will simply find them both wrong and distasteful. Too much of that already. Paul is no breath of fresh air in that department.
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* Robert M. Bell later became an attorney and in 1984 was appointed as a Judge to the Maryland Court of Appeals, a court that had ruled against him in Bell v. Maryland, and where he became its Chief Judge in 1996.