Let me preface this by saying I’m not fan of the Paulies and some of their rude, pushy tendencies. With that, the recent email blast from MoveOn’s Steven Biel must be addressed as the deliberate race-baiting trash it is.
In recent weeks, Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul has repeatedly criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964, saying that private businesses should not be banned from discriminating on the basis of race.
While his campaign spokesman said Paul believes the government should be able to ban racial discrimination, many observers are finding it impossible to draw that conclusion from statements made by Paul himself.
Now is a good time to either question Biel’s grasp of American history or his willingness to carry on the Democrat Party’s shameful tradition of pitting one race against the other for political gain.
I say MoveOn’s Biel may be ignorant of civil rights history because his Democrat Party is the last group of people who should be lecturing anyone on support of the 1964 Act:
It’s one thing for a single candidate to espouse such backward views. It’s something else for the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate to embrace them as well. We need to call Mitch McConnell out.
Can you sign the petition calling on Sen. Mitch McConnell to publicly reject Rand Paul’s criticism of the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
Hopefully Rand Paul has shed his naïveté when it comes to appearing on bear trap programs like the Rachel Maddow show where a followup blog entry on the segment in question is entitled, “Rand Paul on ‘Maddow’ fallout begins”. This implies the liberals were handed a gotcha on a question that would never be asked of Democrats (and with good reason).
When asked about whether he would have signed the 1964 Act, Paul responded…
“I’m not in favor of any discrimination of any form. I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race,” Paul said on Maddow’s program. But when pressed on whether he supported aspects of what the Civil Rights law did, including desegregating lunch counters in privately owned restaurants, Paul gave a dodge-y answer: “Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant? These are important philosophical debates but not a very practical discussion.”
A valid question. Should a 7-11 be able to deny people with no shirt or shoes to enter their stores? Can an employer deny a job at Hooters to an overweight woman? Does a person who worked hard to create a competitive business have the right to hire who he or she wants or does the government control that decision?
Obviously Rand Paul wasn’t talking about racial exclusion which the Act addressed, but give a liberal an opportunity to smear a Republican as a racist, he or she will every time while they have no claim to the passage of most civil rights legislation in this nation’s history.
June 9, 1964 — Republicans condemn 14-hour filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act by U.S. Senator and former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd (D, W. Va.), who still serves in the Senate
June 10, 1964 — Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R, Ill.) criticizes Democrat filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act, calls on Democrats to stop opposing racial equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced and approved by a staggering majority of Republicans in the Senate. The Act was opposed by most southern Democrat senators, several of whom were proud segregationists–one of them being Al Gore, Sr. (D, Tenn.) Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson relied on Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader from Illinois, to get the Act passed.
LBJ, Sen. Dirksen
August 4, 1965 — Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen overcomes Democrat attempts to block 1965 Voting Rights Act; 94% of Senate Republicans vote for landmark civil right legislation, while 27% of Democrats oppose. Voting Rights Act of 1965, abolishing literacy tests and other measures devised by Democrats to prevent African-Americans from voting, signed into law; higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats vote in favor
Democrats would allow blacks to vote for them even though they weren’t considered worthy enough to sit at a restaurant counter with them later.
Most liberals under the MoveOn umbrella are ignorant of American history because it’s been successfully whitewashed by revisionist progressive professors, and just because the left can successfully and racially ambush Rand Paul, doesn’t mean Klan-creating, sufferage-opposing, literacy-testing, poll-taxing, 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment-opposing, black-coding, Jim Crow Democrats ever had the moral high ground in this discussion.
Liberal Democrats can’t claim to be racially tolerant when they continue to lie to an entire people about their history. Steven Biel’s attempt to fund-raise based on a manufactured race controversy is something we’ve unfortunately come to expect of Democrats and MoveOn.org.
Just don’t expect it to go unanswered.
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