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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson, meet Ronald Ernest Paul. He is the very soul of a foolish consistency. Meaning 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 White House and, for that matter, from most politicians, period. Your average pol might rail against the intrusion of government 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 honest for that.
Intellectual honesty is a good thing, if only because it can lead you to reconsider a faulty premise. But in Paul’s take on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 he doubles down on the bad premise instead.
Paul has long argued — and reiterated Sunday on CNN — that the Act, which liberated untold millions of African Americans from the tyranny of Jim Crow, “destroyed the principle of private property and private choices.” In other words, forcing a restaurant to take down a Whites Only sign infringed the rights of the restaurant’s owner. A similar argument was made by segregationists in 1964 — and by slave owners in the 1850s.
