A comment on Rand Paul...

The "Tea Party" favorite, Rand Paul, is all over the news with his "gaff" comments on what was wrong with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I wanted to throw in my two cents and be done with it, so here it is...

Paul seems to think that the government's regulation on who a businessman can or can't offer service to is wrong, regardless of what an individual's position on race or creed may be. This much I have no issue with, as it is a purely ideological position to take and, in an ideal world, would even make sense at a fundamental level of society.

However, Paul's stated comments were that the imposition of government regulation placed a limit on the free market system our Founding Fathers wanted to promote and protect. THIS is where Paul loses his credibility with me, and if he loses his election chances because of it, then it is nobody's fault but his own. Had Paul bothered to become familiar with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the circumstances that led LBJ to sign it into law, he'd have known better than to say what he did.

The Act was passed to correct an unjust system of laws known as the doctrine of "separate but equal", and taught to school children as the "Jim Crow Laws" of Southern segregation. These laws are seen today as an aspect of Southern racism codified and institutionalized by southern States and their all-white leadership and all-white constituencies. History, however... actual, factual history... tells us differently.

In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States passed down the decision for Plessy v. Ferguson. This case made the doctrine of "separate but equal" the de facto law of the land, and institutionalized segregation for nearly the next 60 years, coast to coast, border to border, in all the States of the Union. "Jim Crow" was determined by the SCotUS as "Constitutional" and any and all laws stemming from that decision were acceptable in the eyes of the Federal government.

Thus, I maintain (and I feel history is on my side) that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was fixing a problem within the Federal government itself, and not something native to the "old South". If Paul wants to say that it was wrong for the Feds to regulate who a white businessman can or can't serve, then he needs to not blame LBJ for signing the Civil Rights Act, but instead blame the SCotUS for handing down the "very bad" decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which institutionalized the very same regulation Paul is blaming LBJ for.

THIS is why I'll never be a Libertarian Party member...