The Tea Party effort that is currently populating the rightmost fringes of an already exceeding conservative Republican Party is merely about limiting the size and scope of government, or so the country has been told many times.
Strange, then, that right out of the chutes of gaining Kentucky’s GOP Senate nomination that Tea Party poster boy Rand Paul decided to take the country back to debating the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This historic piece of legislation did many things, including passage of a “public accomodations” provision that said no person could be denied access to publicly owned facilities or privately owned businesses due to “race, color, religion, or national origin.”
Prior to passage of the 1964 law, it was commonplace for African-Americans in the South or Mexican-Americans in the Southwest – especially in wide stretches of West and East Texas – to be denied acccess to public places like swimming pools, or to be refused services by hotels and restaurants because of their race.
The Civil Right Acts put a stop to those practices, but not before heated opposition by conservatives of the day, mostly Southern Democrats, who argued that the federal government had no Constitutional right to tell a restaurant owner who to hire or what customers he chose to serve.
It is almost exactly the same point Paul made recently after securing Kentucky’s Republican Party nomination for a U.S. Senate seat. While supporting the public provisions of the Civil Rights Act, Paul said he had problems with the federal government telling private business what to do. When pressed, Paul said he would have worked to modify parts of the historic 1964 legislation had he been in the Senate at the time.
Paul’s comments created a firestorm in the cable TV chatter world for a few days. Really, it wasn’t all that surprising to hear Paul say such things. Rand Paul, you see, is a libertarian who wants the federal government out of people’s lives except mostly on the abortion issue where he wants the government to intervene on matters of personal choice. Like his father, Ron Paul, a Texas congressman and libertarian guru, Rand Paul also wants heavy government intervention in the area of immigration. Both Paul advocate intrusive government measures to keep dishwashers, construction workers, and hotel cleaning ladies out of the country.
On matters of business, capitalism, and the ownership of property and guns, it’s all hands off by the federal government as seen by the Paul(s) doctrine. It all brings back a comment a friend of mine made years ago when he said of liberatarianism: “It’s great if you can afford it.”
That may have been a bit harsh, but my friend’s point was that, sure, you want the government out of your life if you’re loaded and have no need for its services and protections. Libertarians make several good points, and they’re always talking about the great quest for liberty. Excessive government regulations and intrusions they often say rob Americans of their personal liberties.
They have a point to a certain point, depending on your political view. Still, how about the great loss of personal liberties for decades and through the many generations for African-Americans in the South when it came to their voting rights being denied, or being barred from the simple pleasure of eating at a lunch counter, or staying at a good hotel. Were their personal liberties valued at a lesser measure than their fellow white citizens?
For many years a prominent conservative thinker and libertarian leading light – William F. Buckley – thought so. He was among the most prominent of voices in the 1960s opposition to the Civil Rights Act along the lines of the federal goverment having no right to intervene in the realm of privately owned businesses, or the racial views of Americans whose beliefs impacted public policy and actions on local and state levels.
“I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow (Southern segregation practices),” Buckley said not long before he died a few years back. “I was wrong. ”
Buckley’s admission near the end of his long life that federal government intervention was needed in the matters of civil rights has hardly swayed either Paul or his father – or likely many in the so-called Tea Party movement. Many of the cable TV talking heads theorized that Rand Paul’s beliefs concerning the Civil Rights Act will hurt his general election chances. Maybe, but it certainly will not adversely effect him among Republicans and his Tea Party kin.
The Tea Party effort may indeed be mostly about rolling back the reach of the federal government, but it’s also about the discomfort many in that wing of American political life feel about changing U.S. demographics, not to mention the nation’s first African-American president who so aptly symbolizes those changes. The anti-Obama signage displayed during a typical Tea Party rally along with party conventions featuring the likes of anti-Hispanic demagogue Tom Tancredo tell the story behind the story of the TP.
Back in the day, 1964 to be exact, a Republican House leader, Bill McCulloch, rose to take offense with the Southern Democrats and other conservatives of the day who were so avidly opposing the Civil Rights Act.
“I too believe that state authority should not be needlessly usurped by a centralized government,” McCulloch said, as quoted in the book about that era, Judgment Days. “But I also believe that an obligation rests with the national government to see that the citizens of every state are treated equally without regard to their race or color or religion or national origin.”
The Constitution, McCulloch said, “doesn’t say that whites alone shall have our basic rights, but that we shall all have them.”
Lofty ideals indeed, but nearly 50 years later, the message apparently hasn’t reached all realms of American political life, or some of its most idealistic would-be senators. They’re still waiting to evolve their way up into the American mainstream.
- R.D. Cavazos
Civil Rights Message Fails To Reach Planet Paul is a post from: The Daily Chisme
