Rachel Maddow Interviewed Rand Paul on Civil Rights

There's a lot of buzz today about this interview last night:

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The Rachel Maddow Show Blog has been all over this today:
Rand Paul on 'Maddow' fallout beginsWhat Rand Paul misses about civil rightsRand Paul regrets his Maddow visitSen. Kyl on Paul, Maddow: Civil rights debate no biggie. DeMint's a no.

Here's the deal. Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul won the GOP nomination for Senator of Kentucky, but he's really a libertarian who wants smaller (federal) government. So it came up with the Civil Rights Act and while he's opposed to racism and supports 9 of 10 parts of the act, he has problems with one of them. The nine parts all prevent the government or government funded entities from discriminating. Title II prohibits private businesses that provide public accommodations from discriminating; think restaurants and hotels. Libertarian Paul has a problem with government limiting what private entities can do (except he supports a constitutional ban on abortion and opposes gay marriage).

The idea is that businesses should be compelled by market forces to not discriminate (by say not serving African Americans) because of lost income or other societal pressures. Of course this could take a while and in the mean time people are really hurt. In almost 50 years the Civil Rights Act has done a pretty good job of improving things for minorities, including Title II; and businesses don't seem to be suffering, at least because of it. And I think with the financial crisis and the oil spill it should be clear that some government regulation is good and necessary, further diluting the pure libertarian ideology. James Joyner has more on this, including the constitutional issues Paul raises.

The real problem was that Paul never answered Maddow's question. He didn't just come out and say "yes, I think businesses should have the right to not serve African Americans if they don't want to and I hope that everyone would stop patronizing any business that did so". But such a statement would lose him votes (not just because it's not PC but because it's wrong in today's America), so he avoided saying it but couldn't move off the topic. Maddow kept pushing for answer, something she's better at than most network interviewers. She took some hypotheticals a little too far but generally just let him hang himself. November is far away but it will be interesting to see if Jack Conway, Paul's Democratic competitor will be able to take advantage of this (that is Paul's radical positions, not this interview).

And of course the other problem is that whenever someone tries to take a pro-discrimination stance based purely on ideological constitutional grounds, it doesn't take long for someone to connect them to pure racist bigotry even if it's it indirect and vigorously denied.

Update: And of course Mr. Paul got these views from his daddy.