Randbagged

Exactly one day after winning the GOP Senate primary in Kentucky, tea-party darling Rand Paul got into a lot of trouble. Going on NPR and MSNBC, he was asked about his previous writings that government has no power to ban discrimination by private businesses. He stuck by what he said and all hell broke loose.

You see, in Paul's world, private property rights trump everything. Restaurants can tell black patrons to take a hike. Housing associations can tell Jewish buyers to go back to the shtetl. Companies can tell people who can't get up the stairs to the office that they're on their own, or just refuse to hire them at all. This, of course, flies in the face of the American ideal that everyone must be treated fairly, and has not gone over well with people who have faced discrimination or whose families faced it.

Oh yes, and he said today that President Obama is "un-American" for criticizing BP's turning the Gulf of Mexico into a big oil slick. "Accidents happen," he said dismissively, in one fell swoop losing the support of people whose homes and livelihoods are in danger because they are now covered with oil.

In between bouts of whining over having been called out on his positions, Paul says that the magic of the market will drive discriminatory companies out of business because people won't go there. But guess what? It doesn't work that way.

He seems to have forgotten about two hundred years of American history, when businesses routinely discriminated against anyone who was "other" and prospered while doing it. Blacks, Jews, Irish, Catholics, Hispanics, Asians - the list of excluded people goes on and on. (As a straight white male Presbyterian, Paul has likely never been the victim of any kind of discrimination.) And these biases in private business finally stopped only when government stepped in and said, "you can't do that."

Paul says that freedom includes the freedom to discriminate. This is, of course, well known in his libertarian and tea-party circles, but this week's ruckus is the first time the wider public has heard of it. And from the public reaction, they don't think much of it. Even the larger GOP is backing away from him, knowing that there's simply no way to win this fight.

Paul needs to realize that while in a perfect world no one would discriminate against anyone, we do not live in a perfect world, and people do discriminate. Government has a widely recognized and very legitimate function in putting a stop to bigotry both public and private.

And the longer Rand Paul takes to realize that, the quicker he will be an ex-candidate.