Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Rand Paul would be a laughingstock if he didn’t have a decent chance of actually becoming a U.S. senator, but since he’s the Republican nominee for one of Kentucky’s senate seats, we must now live in fear of the very real possibility that he could be making laws in the near future.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard the gist of his disastrous NPR interview. Rand Paul hates racism but thinks that business owners should be allowed to discriminate against whomever they choose. Things only got worse for him on The Rachel Maddow Show. Paul has made similarly outrageous statements in the past, and at one point in the interview, Maddow decided to put him to the test. She noted that as recently as 2000, Bob Jones University, a private institution, had a ban on interracial dating. Would Rand Paul support Bob Jones University’s right to reinstate this overtly racist, exclusionary policy? The obvious answer, based on Paul’s own logic, is “Yes”. It was fun to watch him blink as he tried to reconcile his “libertarian” policy positions with the notion that they would leave him no choice but to support a blatantly racist policy. Ultimately he responded with, “I abhor discrimination in all its forms,” a delightfully insufficient, transparent non-answer.

Paul says that while he thinks it’s bad business to exclude any potential customer, businesses nevertheless should be granted the right to decide whom they serve. It’s not a totally insane statement, setting aside the obliviousness to the reality of implicit racism, the endorsement of entrenched discrimination, the willful disregard for historical context, and the misunderstanding of the entire purpose of the Civil Rights Act. Rand Paul just wants businesses to be able to select their own clientele, as many businesses already do.

What’s funny is that you don’t need someone like Rachel Maddow to take this line of reasoning to its absurd conclusion. Rand Paul has already done that for us, applying his unique mix of libertarian and Tea Party logic to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Paul thinks that the ADA, enacted in 1990 (Ted Kennedy, I miss you), is a perfect example of unnecessary governmental overreach. He believes that rather than telling businesses to spend money on expensive accommodations for the disabled, they can simply apply “common sense solutions” as they see fit. He’s repeatedly given the example of having a wheelchair-bound employee work in a first-floor office, rather than mandating the construction of an expensive elevator.

Of course, you had better hope that the first floor has bathrooms, and whoops, the conference rooms are all on the third floor, so maybe we can get you a teleconferencing system? In this case, Paul might argue that the business owner should probably install the elevator to accommodate the employee, except that the business owner will certainly argue that rather than bothering with a pricey elevator, the common sense solution is to simply not hire this person. That’s what makes Rand Paul’s objection to the Americans with Disabilities Act so reprehensible, even more so than his critique of the Civil Rights Act. A smart businessman wouldn’t exclude a racial minority at the expense of profits (I’m politely assuming that the majority of his clientele wouldn’t flee in the presence of a minority), but a smart businessman would exclude the disabled, since the costs of complying with the ADA generally outweigh the amount of business brought in by the small percentage of patrons who actually need those ramps, elevators, and parking spaces. Disability is expensive and inconvenient, and thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, you can no longer take the easy way out and ignore it. It very necessarily guarantees that the disabled will have equal access to their local businesses and communities, even if that means a short-term punch to the wallet.

That Rand Paul does not understand this is astounding. He is the most dangerous kind of idiot: an eye surgeon so myopic that he only sees the world from his white, able-bodied perspective.