GOP teabagger candidate, Rand Paul (the son of Rep. Ron Paul), is now backing off of his earlier statement that he opposes the Civil Rights Act.
“As I have said in previous statements, sections of the Civil Rights Act were debated on Constitutional grounds when the legislation was passed. Those issues have been settled by federal courts in the intervening years.”Actually, the creep refused to respond to a direct question about whether he thinks the government had the right to force the integration of lunch counters:
Hours after the NPR interview, [Rachel] Maddow pressed Paul about whether lunch counters should have been desegregated, as activists campaigned for in the 1960s in the South. Paul declined to give a yes or no answer. Instead, he said he doesn't believe in discrimination, suggested the issue was abstract and raised the idea of who decides whether customers can bring weapons into restaurants.Abstract? It's the documented history of the American civil rights movement. It's not abstract at all.
And note that in a separate interview Paul again refuses to answer the question:
INTERVIEWER: Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
PAUL: I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains, and I’m all in favor of that.
INTERVIEWER: But?
PAUL: You had to ask me the “but.” I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners—I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that’s most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind.
