Refusing to allow entire groups of people to participate freely in our economy is bad for everyone, and it's a worse crime than punching someone in the face and taking their money.
Rand Paul and his Tea Bagger friends seem not to understand that a civilized society must rein in the most base human behavior. Or perhaps they just have an odd definition of what base behavior is. How about subjecting people to abusive treatment based on the color of their skin? That's a formula for degraded human interaction if there ever was one. I would rather be punched in the face (which is obviously a crime) than to be exposed every day of my life to the possibility that I might be locked out from ordinary experiences that people with a different color of skin take for granted. I think refusing to serve people of a given race is a serious offense to basic human decency, and should continue to be a crime.
Perhaps more to the point, it would be a burden on our economy--and protecting the economy is another obligation of government.
And then we have arbitrary laws which have nothing to do with baseness. For example, the President of the US must be native born. That seems like a reasonable law to me. The problem is that Tea Partiers believe that their own arbitrary beliefs should have the same power as law(such as their irrational idea that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii despite newspaper announcements at the time of his birth and his often-produced birth certificate). This belief is plain nuts and is based on simple racism.
Paul Remarks Have Deep Roots
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
Wall Street Journal
MAY 22, 2010
Republican candidate Rand Paul's controversial remarks on the 1964 Civil Rights Act unsettled GOP leaders this week, but they reflect deeply held iconoclastic beliefs held by some in his party, and many in the tea-party movement, that the U.S. government shook its constitutional moorings more than 70 years ago.
Mr. Paul and his supporters rushed to emphasize that his remarks did not reflect racism but a sincerely held, libertarian belief that the federal government, starting in the Roosevelt era, gained powers that set the stage for decades of improper intrusions on private businesses.
Mr. Paul, the newly elected GOP Senate nominee in Kentucky, again made headlines Friday when he told ABC's "Good Morning America" that President Barack Obama's criticism of energy giant BP and of its oil-spill response was "really un-American."
That followed a tussle over the landmark civil-rights law, which Mr. Paul embraced after suggesting Wednesday that the act may have gone too far in mandating the desegregation of private businesses...
Rand Paul's American Mistake: Taking 'New' for 'Unconstitutional'
Garrett Epps
The Atlantic
May 25 2010
..."[W]e've never done it before" by itself is never a good argument that something is unconstitutional.
Today, almost no one can imagine the United States without the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- not even "little" Dr. Paul, who has disowned his theoretical musings. The Civil Rights Act completed the creation of a continental economy, where any citizen can go anywhere. Without it, America would be a different country, one that is missed only by those who write for websites named "Stormfront" or "Whitehonor.com."
A generation hence, I suspect, we are likely to be bemused that people ever thought the Constitution would block a modern nation from creating a modern health-care system.
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