The history of the civil rights movement contains enough
episodes of segregationist violence to support the hypothesis
that Title II reduced coercive limitations of the right of
association. Ed Reinke/AP Photo Rand Paul won the Republican
primary in the Kentucky Senate race and almost immediately
stepped into a big pile of steaming controversy by telling
Rachel Maddow that he did not support Title II of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964. Since then few voices have defended his
statements on Maddow’s show, with John Stossel as one of the
rare exceptions. In his recent Christian Science Monitor op-ed
on this topic, Sheldon Richmond defends Paul’s statements
saying, “individuals are either free to do anything peaceful or
they are not.” I reject libertarian objections to Title II
precisely because I agree with the quoted remark: individuals
are either free to do anything peaceful or not. (For the record:
I’m not a libertarian, but the quoted statement is a logical
truth, not a political program.) Black and white peopl