Rand Paul questions Civil Rights Act

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Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul of Kentucky said he would have opposed forcing businesses to integrate under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The day after his stunning primary rout, Paul was asked to explain his recent comments about the landmark law in separate interviews with National Public Radio and MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Paul had told the Louisville Courier-Journal last month that while he supports anti-discrimination laws, he challenges imposing those rules on private businesses.

Questioned by NPR on Wednesday about the Civil Rights Act, Paul said he is opposed to “institutional racism, and I would’ve, had I’d been alive at the time, I think, had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism.”

But Paul added: “I think a lot of things could be handled locally.”

Paul is an eye doctor who had never run for elective office before the Senate primary. He says he shares many of the libertarian views of his father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a presidential candidate in 2008.

The younger Paul trounced the GOP establishment candidate, Secretary of State Trey Grayson, in Tuesday’s primary thanks in part to strong backing from the ‘tea party’ movement and leading conservatives such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.)

Hours after the NPR interview, Maddow pressed Paul about whether lunch counters should have been desegregated, as activists campaigned for in the 1960s in the South. Paul declined to give a yes or no answer. Instead, he said he doesn’t believe in discrimination, suggested the issue was abstract and raised the idea of who decides whether customers can bring weapons into restaurants.

Asked whether he opposes part of the Civil Rights Act, Paul said if “you decide that restaurants are publicly owned and not privately owned, then do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant even though the owner of the restaurant says, ‘Well no, we don’t want to have guns in here.’ The bar says, `We don’t want to have guns in here because people might drink and start fighting and shoot each other.’ Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant?”

-- Associated Press