01.01.70

"A stolid consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." — Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, run across Ronald Ernest Paul. He is the very soul of a foolish consistency. Significance that he is willing, often to a fault, to follow his ideology to its logical and most extreme conclusions.

In this, the congressman differs from other GOP contenders for the Ivory House and, for that matter, from most politicians, period. Your average pol might rail against the intrusion of management into the private lives of its citizens, then turn right around and advocate a law regulating what a gay man does in his bedroom — and see no contradiction. Paul is too intellectually reliable for that.

Intellectual honesty is a good thing, if only because it can lead you to reconsider a imperfect premise. But in Paul's take on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 he doubles down on the bad assume instead.

Paul has long argued — and reiterated Sunday on CNN — that the act, which liberated unreported millions of African-Americans from the tyranny of Jim Crow, "destroyed the grounds of private property and private choices." In other words, forcing a restaurant to take down a Whites Only grapheme infringed the rights of the restaurant's owner. A similar argument was made by segregationists in 1964 — and by slave owners in the 1850s.

Source: Sacramento Bee