Rand Paul's Views on Civil Rights Act Not in Keeping with the Tao

This article was originally published by Technorati on 21 May 2010 as a Simply Spirited feature. To see all my Technorati articles, click Lifestyle in the Contents listing on the sidebar.

In a previous post, we detailed 8 Rules for Governing a Country from the Tao te Ching. There are at least 19 in all, along with other good advice of a general nature.

With election season in full-swing, it might be helpful to voters to have a guide for candidates based on their adherence to the Tao. And who better to start with than a candidate from my home state of Kentucky, Rand Paul, the much heralded would-be Senator backed by the Tea Party.

Paul is certainly welcome to his views, but his Libertarianism seems to have gotten the better of him just one day past his unexpected primary victory. He holds a stringent view of private property rights which stands at odds with the almost universally revered Civil Rights Act of 1964.

While purporting to agree with nine of the ten titles under the Civil Rights Act, he stands by past statements in which he has said that the title applicable to discrimination by private business entities tramples property rights and should have been modified.

This video is 10 minutes long. Maddow can't seem to believe that a person she clearly likes personally could be this inept as a politician, and she gives him extra time to hang himself. Which he does.

Is Rand Paul a racist? Absolutely not. Almost as bad for a politician, he's an ideologue.

In the Tao te Ching, Lao-tzu advises:

If you want to be a great leader,

you must learn to follow the Tao.

Stop trying to control.

Let go of fixed plans and concepts,

and the world will govern itself.

In a later passage, Lao-tzu says:

For governing a country well

There is nothing better than moderation.

Apropos to Rand Paul's case, Lao-tzu says, "The mark of a moderate man is freedom from his own ideas."

Undue attachment to ideas locks people into specious arguments, like the one Paul uses to defend his position on the Civil Rights Act. He says that in order to be consistent, we then have to allow gun owners to exercise their second amendment rights to bear arms into private restaurant establishments, just as we allow African-Americans to eat at Woolworth lunch counters.

It seems that everyone except Paul feels comfortable with this supposed inconsistency.

As per Lao-tzu's guidance, we want our politicians to nimbly circumambulate just these sorts of ideological minefields, even as we sometimes decry them for failing to take stands when we think they ought to.

Our republic, after all, is founded upon political compromise. Ideologues from both sides of the political spectrum tend to have a difficult time with this concept.

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