Rand Paul Wants To Abolish The Americans With Disabilities Act!

[angus]

Q: Do you think Americans, based on the 2nd Amendment, do you think they have a Constitutional right to violently overthrow the government?

PAUL STAFFER: Alright, we’ll have to stop recording.

LOL.  I'd probably stop the interview at that point as well.

Still, Rand Paul has huge balls to take such controversial purist positions.  I think he'll catch quite a bit of grief.  This will be turned into an anti-crippled person position by his opponents, no doubt.  I respect him for sticking to his guns.  On this issue and others.  But I don't think he'll win the seat if he keeps this up.  

[angus]

Does this really have 22 pages?

amazing, ain't it? 

Like I said, Paul is going to be taken completely out of context, even by his supporters, on this and other comments (as evidenced in this thread.)

David Brooks made an interesting, and succinct, comment about it tonight on the Newshour.  I can't remember it exactly, and succinct isn't my long suit anyway, but he basically posed the question of whether voters will go for this sort of weirdo, politically incorrect manifesto so long as they know that they can count on him to be honest.  I'm thinking that political correctness will trump honesty and original thinking, at least in politics, as much as I'd like to believe otherwise.

[angus]

he completely misunderstood the specifics of the law.

Perhaps.  He certainly chose a poor example for illustration, since the law specifically exempts the majority of buildings three stories and under from any requirement to install elevators.

And perhaps he was also misunderstood.  Some say that his philosophy is being intentionally misrepresented, since folks make huge intellectual leaps (from his antipathy for state control to antipathy for anyone who is not like himself).  His detractors seem to defy rules of logic and syllogism, and and his supporters accuse them of taking Paul out of context, or deliberately misrepresenting him in order to discredit him and therefore cause his defeat this November.  It's a tried and trusted plan, and, sadly, we've become accustomed to political enemies engaging in smear campaigns, so why not?  Some will recognize that he that he is simply exploring the small-government philosophy, taking it to its logical extremes, the sort of thing most folks only do at cocktail parties but never in public, especially in our hypersensitive society, but some appreciate his honesty.  It's refreshing to meet a politician who is the same whether at a cocktail party or in a nationally-distributed interview.  There are few politicians, Republican or Democrat, about whom you can say that. 

A major difference between the right and the left is that the right generally limits the powers of the federal government to those specifically enumerated in the constitution, while the left often does not, and because we have evolved into a society in which it is unimaginable to most that someone might feel that the government really has no right to tell private business what to do, whether their office buildings are one story or one hundred stories, those who are predisposed to disagree with the right will not hear that this is actually what he is saying because they are busy looking specifically for evidence with which to discredit him and his ilk.  They may simply be misunderstanding, just as he misunderstands the specifics of the ADA.

Thus you do make a good point:  in our haste to claim the moral high ground, each side is are talking past the other instead of trying for some understanding of what the other side actually thinks.

[angus]

And yet if Paul had his way, those with disabilities would have a much harder time going about their day. Some may try to smear Paul and say he doesn't care about the disabled or doesn't like them or whatever. I would never do that, just like I don't think he is a racist for opposing certain parts of the civil rights bill. That being said, regardless of Paul's motives, the consequences of his actions in the real world, not the fantasy world he seems to live in, would be just as devastating to the disabled. I do think Paul can be criticized for that, don't you think?

Certainly he can be criticized.  If Paul had his way, those with disabilities may very well have a harder time going about their days.  Or they may not.  Folks not forced to take certain steps often take them willingly, and in any case internalized values are stronger and harder to change than enforced ones.  Consider capital punishment:  in the sixties support for the death penalty was on the wane, and likely the people would have decided to do away with it.  But the supreme court ruled in 1967 that it was cruel and therefore unconstitutional.  Another court in 1976 overturned that decision and it came back with a vengeance.  It's sad really.  As an opponent of capital punishment under any circumstances I feel that the court set the cause back several decades, perhaps centuries.  Then again, we really don't know how the wavefunction collapses in some other version of the universe, since any other universe is orthogonal to our own and cannot communicate with ours.  I can't say what would have happened if the court had not decided to legislate from the court, just like you can't say would would happen in a world in which businesses were not forced by law to make certain accommodations.

What we can say is that none of that is relevant to Rand Paul.  That's the point.  Remember the scene in the movie "The Fugitive" when Harrison Ford cried out "I didn't do it.  I'm innocent."  And Tommy Lee Jones replies, "I don't care."  Beautiful answer.  It goes really to the heart of the matter.  He was saying, "I'm not a jury.  I know the newspapers will say that I'm a bad guy, that I want to see you hang, that I think you committed a crime and that I stubbornly refuse to believe your story or even to look for a one-armed guy.  But that's not it at all.  I'm simply trying to catch you.  I do so without passion or prejudice."

Rand Paul wants business free to operate on their own terms.  He does not want to live in a world where crippled folks and black people and women and foreigners are treated less human than those in power.  He has said as much, and I believe him.  I have no reason not to, since it does not follow from his desire for freedom, personal and business freedom, to have a higher priority than protectionism.  And I think he's being misinterpreted.  I don't think the misinterpretation is necessarily malicious or intentional, for the most part, but it's misinterpretation.  Sure, there are some who are smart enough to keep the concepts separate in their minds, and should be more honest and basically criticize his views as being unrealistic or misinformed, as you have--and you may be right.  Or you may not.  We just don't know how things would play out if such laws were revisited and revised in order to give businesses more freedom--but the majority of the criticism comes from folks who obviously cannot keep the concepts separate in their minds, and who either intentionally or intentionally misinterpret him.  I tend to think the majority of the misinterpretation is unintentional, driven by a herd mentality and perhaps by a few very clever malicious types who want to see him lose.