Tea Party candidate faces heat for stance
Paul criticizes Civil Rights Act
WASHINGTON — Rand Paul, the Tea Party movement candidate who overcame opposition from the Republican establishment to win the party’s nomination for Senate in Kentucky on Tuesday, placed himself yesterday into a potentially damaging dispute over civil rights and race.
In doing so, he provided Democrats an opportunity to portray him as extreme and renewed concern among Republicans that his views made him vulnerable in a general election.
Paul, in a series of TV and radio interviews, suggested that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was too broad and should not apply to private businesses. As his statements drew a swarm of attacks from opponents, Paul issued a statement declaring that he would not support repealing the landmark 1964 statute and accusing political opponents of trying to distort his views by saying he favored repeal.
“Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws,’’ he said. Later, in an interview on CNN, he said that if he had been in the Senate in 1964, he would have voted in favor of the act. Democrats quickly mobilized to draw attention to what they cast as out-of-the-mainstream positions espoused by Paul — from raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 to questioning the legality of the Americans with Disabilities Act — as they sought to discredit what Jack Conway, the Democratic Senate candidate in Kentucky, described as Paul’s “narrow and rigid philosophy.’’
Paul said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday that he supported the sections of the Civil Rights Act that applied to public accommodations but had concerns when it came to its applicability to private business; he raised similar concerns earlier in the day about the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Asked whether a private business had the right to refuse to serve black people, Paul replied, “Yes.’’
“I’m not in favor of any discrimination of any form,’’ Paul continued. “I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race. We still do have private clubs in America that can discriminate based on race. But I think what’s important about this debate is not written into any specific `gotcha’ on this, but asking the question: What about freedom of speech? Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking?’’
“I don’t want to be associated with those people,’’ he said, “but I also don’t want to limit their speech in any way in the sense that we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that’s one of the things freedom requires is that we allow people to be boorish and uncivilized.’’
