Within about 18 hours, Paul told radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham that he would have voted for the law: “I think the South had failed and that the federal government did have a role in endingdiscrimination in all of these practices.” Which is the right answer, politically and substantively. There was no reason to wait decades more until the South haltingly evolved out of its retrograde commitment to the mores of the Confederacy.
This brings up a point and a good illustration of a political reality: you can't reason someone out of a position he hasn't been reasoned into. Gun control folks are the worst about this, and why it's so maddening to have to deal with them.
But it clearly illustrates how government coersion isn't the answer. When the CRA '64 was signed, government coersed businesses to do things that they were not wont to do .... they tried to 'reason' with bigots the only way the government knows how, by force.
To any man who values his liberty, being forced to do something he doesn't want to do only makes him dig in his heels. 40 years later, his sons and daughters may not give a flying fuck about the Confederate flag, but because Daddy has griped about government intrusion all his life, Buffy and Kip stay the family course, getting Confederate flag tattoos and being denied entrance into the Marine Corps.
But had the government merely condemned the practice of segregation, it may have taken a long time, but the South would have eventually come to the realization that segregation is wrong on their own.
And it would have been a reasoned realization ..... one that would have stuck.
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