If you haven’t heard about this yet today, you certainly are about to. On Tuesday night, Rand Paul, son of the Texas libertarian congressman (and presidential also-ran) Ron Paul, won the Republican primary in Kentucky’s Senate race. And on Wednesday night, he went on The Rachel Maddow Show and more or less called for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act. He’s spending Thursday doing damage control.

You remember those anti-drug ads a couple of decades back? The ones where a baby-boomer dad finds a kid’s stash and confronts him, saying “where’d you learn this stuff?” and the kid, accusingly, responds, “I learned it FROM YOU, DAD!” Pop looks stricken, and the ad then informs us that parents who smoke dope have kids who smoke dope. Or something like that.

Well, Dr. Paul is merely carrying his father’s philosophy out to its logical end. If government has absolutely zero business in the private sector, then it can’t tell you not to sell your products to people of other races. This neatly points out the brick wall that libertarians eventually run into: If you want one thing, and I want something that conflicts with that thing, and we fight it to a stalemate, someone will finally have to adjudicate, and sooner or later there’s no appeals process left except the law.

We’ll know soon enough whether Rand Paul gets bounced from the ticket, or merely goes on to ignominy in November (or, this being a race in Kentucky, whether he gets a bounce in the polls this week). But I’m curious to see whether his dad’s viewpoints suddenly see extra scrutiny.

Nice story here of the father-son dilemma, plus the clip from Maddow.