Only a week ago, Rand Paul rode high on his winning the Republican Senate primary in Kentucky. We all learned how Teabagger support had been the key to Rand Paul's victory and to his nomination as the Republican candidate for the Senate-seat being vacated by Republican Jim Bunning.

Then we learned how Rand Paul cannot bring himself to endorse the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It's not that Paul supports segregation in public places, he says, but his Libertarian beliefs compel him to uphold the right of private businesses to choose the patrons with whom they want to do business. Libertarians, Teabaggers and right-wing Republicans call that the right to personal freedom. In American history, we call it Jim Crow.

When I was young and my family lived in New Jersey, outside of New York City , I remember one Sunday after Church in the mid-1960s, when we went to the Rahway train station. My father must have needed to buy tickets. We went into the station, and we did whatever it was we needed to do and then we returned to the car. But apparently, we had forgotten something, and my mother jumped out of the car and went back into the station. My father parked in front of a barber shop.

A barber's pole was mounted on the building outside of the shop. A sign said "Colored". I hadn't seen a sign like that before, but I knew what it meant. Looking through the barbershop door, I could see that only Black people were inside.

The whole time we waited in the car for my mother, a dog barked in front of the shop. The dog was tied to a street sign. My father said matter-of-factually that the dog was barking because Black people had a strong odor (he didn't say "a bad smell") – which struck me as strange because the dog seemed to belong to one of the Black people inside the shop.

That memory touches on the social and economic dynamics that Rand Paul values and wants to increase.

First, Rand Paul supports the operation of businesses for the purpose of serving particular classes of patron. And second, Paul supports the application of bias, in iddistinguishing the characteristics of the classes of patron that a business wants to serve. All of which is consistent with the Libertarian/Republican effort to privatize private intercourse.

Don’t be fooled by Rand Paul's smarmy abhorrence of Jim Crow and of Jim Crow's return to the public square. Rand Paul's allegiance lies with the right-wing desire to discriminate in private.

Keep in mind how funny it is that right-wingers vehemently deny the operation of bias at the level of whole populations (the operation of bias at the level of race or gender), right up until the time the right-winger asserts his holy personal freedom to act upon biases for business purposes.

Many Kentuckians – it turns out – don't see things Rand Paul's way. The report I've cited above describes the results of a poll that shows Kentuckians have withdrawn their support for Rand Paul, after learning what he stands for.

For a gallery of segregationist photographs of how businesses once operated – as Rand Paul thinks they should – and catered to different races, prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, see the Library of Congress Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination: Documentation by Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photographers.


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