He doesn't support racism in any form, Kentucky GOP candidate for Senate Rand Paul just opposes government mandates, such as provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that bar private citizens and businesses from racist practices. Fair enough, Mr. Paul. But there's a little problem with the position...
Ran Paul's statements, in his interview on the Rachel Maddow Show [see video segments, below], raise the obvious question - if private property rights trump human rights, why can't corporations, private businesses, and private property owners own slaves ?
Curious minds want to know.
I wrote that yesterday, after noticing the growing flap over candidate Ran Paul's now-notorious Maddow Show interview in the wake of his upset victory in the Kentucky GOP Senate primary on Wednesday. The title for my piece was, "OK, Ran Paul, can businesses and landowners own slaves ?"
But I didn't post it, because curiosity got the better of me. With a little digging I soon had evidence that last year, in April 2009, Ran Paul gave a keynote address for the state branch of a political party, The Constitution Party, whose founder Howard Phillips has described Rousas J. Rushdoony as "my wise counselor" according to Talk To Action cofounder Frederick Clarkson.
Pulling out my copy of Clarkson's Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy [1997, Common Courage Press] I learn that Howard Phillips wrote, of R. J. Rushdoony's magnum opus,
"Each of us who has read the Institutes of Biblical Law... has been uniquely privileged. God has blessed us with exposure to the insights and teachings of a great theologian and servant... I have no doubt that he will be ever after regarded as one of the most significant figures in the history of Christian thought and advocacy."
Here's what Rushdoony had to say about slavery:
The private ownership of slave labor in the American South has been the subject of extensive distortion. The Negroes were slaves to their tribal heads in Africa, or prisoner-slaves of other tribes. The monetary unit in black Africa was man, the slave. The Negro moved from an especially harsh slavery, which included cannibalism, to a milder form. Much is said about the horrors of the slave ships, many of which were very bad, but it is important to remember that slaves were valuable cargo and hence property normally handled with consideration. [R.J. Rushdoony, Politics of Guilt and Pity (Fairfax, VA: Thoburn Press, [1970] 1978)]
Ron Paul and his quasi-eponymous offspring Rand have long gotten a pass from media on their ties to theocratic Christian nationalism, but the announcement for Rand Paul's April 25th appearance at the Minnesota chapter of the Constitution Party hasn't been a great secret, it's just been unnoticed until now. But it was posted smack on Ronpaulforums.com.
R. J. Rushdoony wanted America to "return" to "Biblical law," wanted to see stoning imposed as a form of execution, and thought the Sun revolved around the Earth. And, he thought slavery wasn't so bad at all. In fact, Rushdoony wanted to re-impose the institution.
Now, given the horrific state of America's penal system Rushdoony's approach to criminal justice, of re-imposing slavery, wouldn't necessarily be much worse than the status quo but it nonetheless would set a rather dismal precedent that would help roll back global concern for human rights several hundred years at least.
The Rushdoony factor puts Ran Paul's uncomfortable performance on the Rachel Maddow Show in a different light and presents all sort of questions our intrepid mainstream media will probably never ask Paul, such as:
[media] "Mr. Paul, do you know who R. J. Rushdoony is ? And have you read his work ?"
[crickets...]
Of course, to be fair, many in the mainstream media who probably don't have a clue who Rushdoony was nonetheless have seen something like this coming.
As Chris Good of The Atlantic observed yesterday,
Here's one thing that can, plainly, be said about the controversy over Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act: this is exactly what Democrats hoped would happen.
The Democratic campaign and message apparatus has been banking, for months, on the rightward tilt of the Tea Party to damage the Republican Party in November's midterm elections. They put out a strategy memo to this effect in January.
The idea is, basically: Tea Partiers are crazy, right-wing extremists. If the Republican Party elects them to run in November, the Republican Party will lose. Democrats have been saying this for months.
Good's piece is, well, quite good but it could be better. What's at issue here is not Ran Paul's association with "crazy, right-wing extremists." What's "crazy" ? Who's an "extremist" ? Those labels are all but useless. What's at stake is Ran Paul's association with a movement which says it wants to re-impose "Biblical law" (or its interpretation of that).
Writing for The Washington Post, Dave Weigel sums up Rand Paul's rapid backpedaling from his statements on the Maddow Show:
Bowing to the reality that this has become an ugly national story, Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul released a lengthy statement on his views about the Civil Rights Act.
Although it no doubt is embarrassing, it's wise for Ran Paul to throw his campaign ship into full emergency reverse before it smacks the looming iceberg of the "r word." Here's what I wrote yesterday, on what I saw as the logical implications of the position Paul staked out Wednesday with Rachel Maddow:
Within American jurisprudence there always has been and there always will be an uneasy tension between private property rights and the public, collective good. But Ran Paul's position seems radically skewed towards property. The flip side of Paul's "discrimination as free-speech" position is this - it logically implies, whether Paul has consciously thought it through or not, that some (or all, but that's for Ran Paul to say) human rights vanish on private property. Where does it end ?
It's crucial to understand how radical and regressive Ran Paul's views truly are - while Paul would surely disagree, his stance, which implies that when US citizens are on private land the property owner has the right, essentially, to strip away their human rights, evokes the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision which, among other things "ruled that because slaves were not citizens, they could not sue in court. Lastly, the Court ruled that slaves—as chattel or private property—could not be taken away from their owners without due process."
Per the Dred Scott decision, slaves were not human beings with inalienable rights. They were commodities, objects that could be possessed, bought, and sold. According to Ran Paul's argument, private property owners can strip citizens of their rights, and there's already precedent - in Texas, under certain conditions land owners can legally use lethal force against trespassers. Why not simply make them into slaves ?
In his interview on the Maddow Show Ran Paul stated quite clearly his view that racism practiced by individuals or businesses is an expression of First Amendment free-speech rights and on that basis Paul opposes the provision of the Civil Rights act that bars private businesses from discriminatory practices. According to Ran Paul racist discrimination is a form of free speech.
But the classic Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in case did not involve speech. It involved the segregationist practice of refusing to serve lunch to African Americans so bold as to sit on the "whites only" stools at the Woolworth lunch counter. Prior to the Woolworth sit-in, which touched off a wave of similar sit-ins across the segregated South, blacks buying lunch at the Greensboro Woolworth had to eat standing up.
In effect, segregationist practices, whether by government entities or by private businesses, relegated some citizens to second-class status. In the interview Ran Paul stated that he thought civil rights, and handicapped rights issues, could be addressed locally. But during the Civil Rights struggle the concerns of Civil Rights protesters were addressed locally - with riot batons, police dogs, and water cannons. It took federal legislation to overturn Jim Crow laws and segregationist policies, because local power structures in the South supported racist practices.
As Rachel Maddow noted, as a result of a discussion Ran Paul had with the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board the newspaper declined to endorse either GOP primary candidate, calling the choice presented to Republican voters "dismal." As a Courier Journal editorial put it,
"The trouble with Dr.Paul is that despite his independent thinking much of what he stands for is repulsive to people in the mainstream. For instance he holds an unacceptable view of civil rights, saying that while the federal government can enforce integration of government jobs and facilities, private businesspeople should be able to decide whether they want to serve black people, or gays, or any other minority group."