Talk Elections

Let's see where the chips fall on this one. I'm interested in seeing how many libertarians step up to defend human liberty by voting in favor. :P

Yes (D)

Umm...yes?

Yes (R) as the flaws in the bill aren't nearly just enough cause to vote against it.

I'm the first No vote so far.  Title II (public accommodations) is somewhat problematic for me, yet the need to ensure that people have the freedom to travel wherever they wish means I could support it, tho I do wish the law had defined public accommodation a bit more narrowly to exclude entertainment venues as those are not necessary for there to be a freedom to travel.  Title VII (employment) is far more problematic. and thus I could not vote for this bill.

While it is generally stupid to discriminate on the basis of any of the reasons banned in Title VII, I firmly believe that it is not the role of government to outlaw private stupidity, as it has often been only a short distance from that to some egregious violations of human rights.  ("It's stupid to allow the <insert name of ethnic group> to <immigrate, hold certain professions, marry outside their group, etc.>)

Why the difference in my views on Titles II and VII?  Basically, it's because of the length and degree of the economic relationship involved.  Title VII is forcing private individuals to engage in long-term economic relationships with people they would rather not have to deal with.  Whereas, with public accommodations, there isn't a long-term relationship that needs to be entered into (altho there may well be long-term customers).

The rest of the Act I would be cheerfully able to support.

No, for the reasons True Federalist outlined.

Yes. Those who think that any real or perceived flaws in the Act as passed justify voting No have pretty skewed priorities.

Yes

Yes (not a racist).

Yes. (R/I/O)

Yes. Those saying no seem to be pretty utopian in their ideology.

Yes (L), with some reservations that get easily overridden.

Yes (Southern D)

Just to add on, I agree with True Federalist's post, but I'd still vote yes as the bill as awhole is a great thing.

Yes, for the same reason I would have voted for the Affordable Care Act.  The Civil Rights Act was more of a statement on the issue of race and segregation.  It didn't solve the problem of systemic racism, but it did change perceptions on a lot of things.
I'm sorry but anyone who disagrees with this is either ignorant of what the issue of race meant in the 1960s or simply didn't care about the wellbeing of their fellow human beings suffering in Alabama or Mississippi.

No (R).

I don't see anyone making utopian arguments here.  People not being pragmatic perhaps.  Those are too very different things, as utopians often have no trouble being extremely pragmatic in seeking their goals.

Most of the utopian rhetoric at the time was in favor of the CRA (not at all to say that one had to be utopian to support it).

What do you think? 

That's my point.  The fact that it was a perception-changing statement makes all other disagreements void.

I won't call you a racist, but I most certainly will call you naive (yes, TrueFederalist, you are in the club too).

You guys (assuming you would have voted no) aren't utopian, just plain naive. You really think discrimination in jobs and accommodations would have ended on their own? When things like that are ingrained into the entire society, they don't change without something of the scale of the Civil Rights Act.

I guess it's also very easy for white men to think about this in completely theoretical terms, isn't it? It's not like you would have been impacted regardless of what transpired without the CRA.

Discrimination was only kept alive in the South because Jim Crow laws made it mandatory. No business that wanted to make a profit would purposefully prohibit a third of the population from being customers. Prohibiting discrimination by private businesses prevented racists from being punished at the marketplace since they were forced to accommodate blacks anyway. It also opened up the slippery slope of intrusion into property rights since it is impossible to tell if one is being discriminatory by making an employment decision absent a mind-reader. Hence, Title VII only encouraged racism by effectively forcing employers to take race into account when making hiring decisions, lest they be accused of discrimination.

But would Jim Crow laws have changed without the CRA?

You're using a straw man. I'm not opposed to the entirety of the CRA; the only sections I am opposed to are the ones that interfere with private property. I would support it if Titles II and VII were eliminated.

And again, it's what that reasoning for voting against such legislation says about your priorities that's problematic, not the argument itself. I don't often accuse people of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, because I do it myself a fair amount, but this is a big, fat, glow-in-the-dark example.

Because property rights > human rights.

Jim crow laws enshrined discrimination that was outlawed by titles II and VII. Without the CRA, it is likely those laws would have remained in place for a long time, probably till this day.

Ah, Libertarians...

Jim Crow laws made such discrimination mandatory, thus also infringing on property rights. Jim Crow laws and the CRA only differ in that one encouraged racial preference against blacks and the other encouraged racial preference towards blacks. I'm not arguing that legislation similar to the CRA in its other aspects was unnecessary; I'm merely opposed to those portions of the CRA that use Jim Crow-esque means to accomplish racially egalitarian ends. If a version of the CRA were passed that instead of Title II and Title VII had laws preventing state governments from interfering with private business' employment decisions and overturning mandatory segregation in private businesses, I would favor that.

It's not an inequality.

Quite the reverse.  By and large pre-1964 laws regulating who could hire whom had generally been dystopian, such as the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany.   The power of the government to tell people they must not use ethnicity to make a decision is the same power that could be used to tell people they must use ethnicity to make a decision.  I would deny the government the power in either case as a general rule.

I'm willing to make an exception to the general rule in the case of public accommodations, because in the context of 1964 I see no good way to ensure freedom of movement without it, tho I'm doubtful that Title II is particularly needed today.

But when it comes to private employment, I'm not comfortable with government forcing employers to hire people they would rather not hire, even tho it would be in their own economic interest to do so.

Yes (D)

Well, for many of the reasons stated by others, I would have opposed it. With the removal of a couple sections, though, I would be an enthusiastic supporter.

EDIT: While I think there are flaws with the act and I would vouch for their removal, either before the vote or after the bill became law, I still would have voted for this.

You're joking....right?

It's fun seeing pasty white teenagers saying how evil it is to require businesses to not turn away black customers/prospective employees due to race.

No (R)

I am Strongly Against the Civil Rights Acts

You people are so bold! It's such a brave stance to take! I'm impressed at your iconoclasticism!

You do realize you are literally advocating thought crimes by advocating laws to prohibit employment discrimination. How can you expect an government official charged with enforcing equal opportunity for employment to determine whether an employer was being discriminatory in his decision? You do not have a mind-control device, so presumably you would have to use equality of outcome as the benchmark since equality of opportunity is impossible to enforce. However, by mandating equality of outcome, you are effectively forcing the employer to racially discriminate in his hiring decisions in order to achieve the desired racial quota to avoid legal harassment.

ITT: White people complaining about things that don't harm them.

Yeah, I am very glad there are anti-discrimination laws on the books. The people who aren't affected by it don't really care though it seems.....ugh.

Without second thoughts, yes. It gives a modest amount of protections to the peasants, in this case ones who have suffered discrimination, so of course I support it.

The standard for employment discrimination under Title VII is not as harsh towards employers as you suggest.  Plaintiffs under Title VII do need to prove a discriminatory motive to win.  It is true that proving motive is difficult and the doctrine is somewhat problematic.  But, the burden is on the employee.  Ultimately, it is very difficult for a plaintiff to win a Title VII employment case in Court.  

Obviously, there's the potential for abuse of the civil rights act.  I wish we didn't need it.  But, you have to consider how the structural private racism that existed in 1964 utterly corrupted our society and destroyed the personal liberty of black people.  For that reason, personal liberty exercised to deny jobs, services and basic human dignity to black folks was not a private matter. Private racism ruined the lives of generations of people.  You can't truly be a democratic country or a free country without addressing that.

I think you know: Yes (R).

Basically.

If that is the case, then what is the point of having it? To force employers to be more subtle about racial motivations in their hiring practices?

EDIT: Additionally, you seem to act as though court cases are inexpensive. Even if it really is rare for a plaintiff to win a Title VII case in court, the employer still has to waste money proving his innocence rather than using it to invest in his business or deliver profits. Thus, the employer is still encouraged to bend over backwards for minority applicants lest they be faced with an expensive lawsuit.


The cause of black people's plight was not private racism, it was state-sanctioned racism. State facilities segregated blacks, the state forbade private businesses from integrating, state schools instilled racist ideology into young minds. Title VII takes the means used by Jim Crow and merely changes the ends to forced integration instead of forced segregation.

Yes, but i would propose amendments to bill to change it

America was founded on the right to refuse to serve black people at your diner.

I see you have no intention of engaging in constructive discourse and merely intend on attacking straw men. If such is the case, there is no point in rebutting any of your arguments, since there is no substance to them.

This quote automatically makes you a massive HP.  It may not be "we reserve the right to refuse service to robots and space bikers", but it's WAY worse.  I know you're being sarcastic, but you're completely wrong on this one.  Even one of my PoliSci professors said that the "state's rights" argument was irrelevant and was essentially calling for a return to the Articles of Confederation.

I was being completely sarcastic, dude. I was poking fun of the libertarian arguments against the CRA.

Why are you so sure that Title VII forced all businesses to bend over backwards for the benefit of their minority employees?  It's not like the likelihood of a title VII case is the only consideration for a business.  From a purely economic perspective, there are a ton of incentives towards hiring the most qualified person.  Those incentives still exist. Meanwhile, how many people file these lawsuits?  It is enough to completely override the business judgment in favor of the consideration of one type of lawsuit?

And yes, legal compliance can be costly.  It's costly for the environmental laws and accounting laws too.  Providing a legal remedy for victims of discrimination is a worthy goal and we should we willing to spend money on it.


A chance of being sued by your employee for reinstatement or monetary damages is like Jim Crow?  I'll take the chance of litigation against my business over being murdered and hung from a tree by the Klan any day.  Which reminds me, the KKK wasn't a federal agency last time I checked and it factored into the plight of black people.  Do you have any idea what the Jim Crow South was like?

You really can't disentangle the government from the people or private from public racism; especially in a world where our current state of affairs is the product of hundreds of years of government enforced discrimination.  Racism itself is a moral wrong.  Acquiescence to private racism is accepting a moral wrong.

So Barry Goldwater was a racist?

Certainly his actions were.

Goldwater was a founding member of the NAACP in Arizona and was instrumental in making his family's department stores one of the first businesses in that state to desegregate.  He was not a racist, but Democrats successfully portrayed him as one in the 1964 campaign for his vote, even tying him to the KKK in ads.

I know.

::)

Stop bringing racism into this you hack. It's all about constitutional rights of states and rights of business.

Bork was a champion of civil rights who just thought 1964 CRA was too extreme.

Ah, I see this thread is full of rebels in their own lunchtime.

Absofrickinglutley I don't see how anyone wouldn't have voted for it

Notice how you set up a straw man argument. I did not say that Title VII forced all businesses to bend over backwards for minority applicants, I said that they are encouraged to do so, particularly at the margin. If a white applicant is worth $10 more to a business than a black applicant who is less qualified, but there is a 1% chance that the black applicant will file a Title VII lawsuit that will cost the business a minimum of $1000 in legal fees and possibly more if the lawsuit is successful, then the business will opt for the less qualified applicant if it wants to minimize losses.

One could argue that such a loss would be worth it if it means that blacks will avoid employment discrimination. However, a free market penalizes employment discrimination without encouraging marginal employment discrimination in favor of minorities. If government laws regarding discrimination are not taken into account, if a black applicant is worth $10 more to a business than a less qualified white applicant, then the employer must undergo an opportunity cost of $10 for letting racism factor into his hiring decision. Switch the races of the two applicants and the assessment remains true, something that cannot be said about Title VII. At no point would the market encourage racial discrimination to be a factor in hiring decisions, which makes Title VII both unnecessary and counterproductive toward reducing racial discrimination in hiring decisions.


To suggest that one is a "victim" of discrimination is to imply that one has a right to a job. If I do not have a right to work at Starbucks, then how can I claim any damages from not being allowed to work at Starbucks?


Again, you set up a straw man argument by accusing me of faulty analogy. I do not deny that Jim Crow was far worse in magnitude than the CRA is. However, that is essentially the difference; both encourage racial discrimination, Jim Crow simply did it far more egregiously. As far as the KKK, you seem to be ignorant of the degree to which the KKK infiltrated local law enforcement during Jim Crow and the the degree to which the state tolerated the KKK's presence. Do you really think lynching would have been so prevalent had the state cracked down on them with the same ferocity that they enforced murder laws for everyone else?



I'm not really sure how to respond since I neither advocated private racism not encouraged acquiescence to it. An absence of government coercion is both necessary and sufficient to enable those who let private racism guide them in their decisions be monetarily sanctioned for their actions. Coercion can only aggravate this by placing incentives for discrimination one way or the other.

If people were purely rational economic actors, there would never have been racism in the first place.  The real question is what is the baseline of racial discrimination forms the backdrop of our analysis. You're comparing the 64 Civil rights act to a free, rational employment market, not the world as it existed in 1964.  In 1964 America was profoundly racist towards blacks.   


Discrimination is unfair treatment on account of your race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.  You only have a right to a particular job if you would have had that job absent discrimination. 


Again, you're imagining a fairy tale world where the entire society hadn't been shaped by racist attitudes for hundreds of years.  If there was no accreted racism in our society in 1964, you're completely correct. But, the people in our country were racist.  In a country full of racists, your counter-factual of a racially neutral fair government is not possible.  We had to change our society and take difficult steps personally, not just end the most egregious Jim Crow laws.

To pick at Bedstuy's point, obviously not everyone is a perfectly rational economic actor. But let's look at it from the other side. Southern racists were obviously willing to take black money. They may not let them sit at the lunch counter, but if their racism was that dominant, they wouldn't be letting blacks in at all. All it takes is a few places serving blacks and all of a sudden you lose money by sticking to your racist principles.

This has been shown on numerous occasions, most notably with Jackie Robinson in Major League Baseball. I also believe blacks were hired in some industries in apartheid South Africa solely because the executives wanted to save on pay. Once there is a critical mass of people willing to put aside their racism for cash, the problems tend to die off.

Unless the government is enforcing them of course.

That actually strengthens my point.  From the perspective some certain people, the subjugation of one race can be beneficial even it's not optimal from the aggregate perspective.  White workers feared black competition in skilled labor/trades and excluded blacks from unions and job opportunities.  The Southern agricultural sector exploited blacks first under slavery and then under quasi-slavery after reconstruction.

More broadly, being somewhat tolerated in spite of your race because people can make money off of you is completely insufficient.  All races of people deserve to be treated the same.  That situation you describe is just selectively decent treatment at the convenience of the majority.

A free employment market only did not exist due to laws preventing its existence. Repealing laws mandating racial segregation in the workplace would have been sufficient to eliminate racial discrimination, and those employers who continued to view their prospective employees in racist terms would be penalized.  


So, assuming that I am a competent waiter, I have a right to work at Hooters?

The problem with this worldview is that employment is not a tangible entity, it is a contractual agreement between employer and employee. You state that I only have a right to a contractual agreement between myself and my employer if I would have had that contractual agreement absent discrimination. However, since this contractual agreement is voluntary, this means I only have such a right if my employer would have agreed to the contract absent discrimination, something that only my employer can attest to. Thus, if I have a right to a job, such a right is unenforceable since such a right only exists if my employer acknowledges it exists.


If a racially neutral fair government was not possible in American society in 1964, then how on earth did the CRA pass?

I never really got how people elevate "constitutional" to the level of a moral imperative.  In what system of ethics does a very murky question of law affect whether or not something was right or wrong?  I get so weary of seeing people flog the Constitution in political debates as some kind of moral stance, when they're using it to conceal their support for truly vile institutions like segregation.

Alternately, "Stop quoting laws to us, we carry swords."  -Pompey the Great

Employment law wasn't brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses.  We're allowed to change the law if we think it makes sense.  The standard for what constitutes illegal employment discrimination was decided by Congress and the Courts.  Essentially, we add into every contract that employers with a certain number of employees need to follow Title VII and the relevant law.  That's the cost of doing business and it probably gets incorporated into prices.  What's so bad about that?


The Civil Right Act was extremely difficult to pass and met with massive resistance from the South. It was a step in the right direction by part of the country, sure.  But, the same year Mississippi basically allowed a terrorist campaign against black people who wanted to exercise their civil rights.  We had a long way to go to become a non-racist society back then and we're still not there today.  What makes you think racism was a minor social issue in America?

I posited how is it feasibly possible to determine whether an employer has racially discriminated in his hiring practices and how is it feasibly possible for one to have a "right" to a job. You replied with a legal justification for barring racially discriminatory hiring pratices.  It's the equivalent of replying to a question of how can a man get an abortion by pointing to Roe vs. Wade.


Could you point out where I said racism was a minor social issue in America? You said that without changing our society, it is pointless to ponder about a racially-neutral government. However, you made this argument in the context of advocating the use of government as a engine for societal change. This seems to contradict your previous assertion that societal attitudes determine the nature of government rather than the reverse.

If Bork opposed it, then it was for legal reasons.  Otherwise, he was a pretty strong civil rights supporter.  So he was kind of like Goldwater.

I don't understand your reasoning on either point.  Courts make factual findings on motive all the time.  It happens in thousands of court cases every year.  This is just one type of motive. As to Title VII, it does not imply any general right to a job and doesn't require one.


Government can enforce and abide by the 14th Amendment.  That's really helpful in ending discrimination.  We would agree on that. But, the 14th Amendment only applies to state action and requires an extremely high level of proof of intention to discriminate.

So, the existing laws of 1964 would leave all private action untouched and would bar only overt, obvious discrimination by the government.  That might be enough in world that had some degree of racial equality and a racial comity.  But, in a world where the norms of our society were racist towards blacks and consistently favored whites, I don't see how government neutrality is enough.  You asserted that economic incentives would naturally lead to the disappearance of racism. 

Maybe that's true in the extremely long run.  But, in the short run, you have to justify that fact that you value the economic rights of businesses and the cost of litigation over providing a remedy to the black people suffering from private racial discrimination.  Perhaps you think it's pure conjecture that white men have enjoyed enormous advantages over everyone else.  But, given the history of the country I think that's an ahistorical and naive view. 

So you think that a court knows more about the details about running a business than the employer does? Whether one applicant is more qualified for a particular position than another is not an objective fact; it is a subjective decision made by the employer. Given this, only the employer can truly know whether he has racially discriminated in his hiring practices. The only conceivable way the Court can circumvent this problem is by using quotas as a determinant of racial discrimination, but then we are left with state-imposed equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.


Then how can you claim the right to be free of employment discrimination as a civil right if such a right doesn't exist?


Oh no, an extremely high level of proof? Next you'll be telling me that people are innocent until proven guilty under this system?


They have and they did. If economic incentives were not there to encourage racial equality, the CRA's provisions would have been fruitless. Do you really think that businesses would not have found a way around integrating if it would have been profitable? They might have hired fewer employees to avoid exceeding the number to which Title VII provisions applied, to name one example.


If that remedy involves forced association between two nonconsenting individuals, then yes. In the absence of discriminatory laws, blacks would have already had a remedy for private racial discrimination: it's called the marketplace. I don't see why blacks would not have reacted as strongly to a discriminatory private business as they did to Montgomery public transit.


I never denied that the justice system was favored toward white men during the first centuries of America. However, you don't fix that by suddenly making it biased in the other direction (albeit not as flagrantly.) That problem is alleviated by eliminating state discrimination.

The idea that the only impact of a bill with this sort of bureaucratic and economic significance is that it has improved opportunities for minorities strikes me as naive. 
If someone says that the free market would take care of discrimination, that’s unrealistic and ideological.  Prejudices are often powerful enough to overcome the profit motive.  And if segregation is held at a high premium, it can create demand.

Given what blacks were going though at the time, the significance this bill held for them, I imagine I’d support it in spite of some significant difficulties.  Different circumstances call for different priorities.  Likewise, one should be able to go back in and make reforms to a bill like this
- but then too often any hint of criticism toward any aspect of such a landmark legislation is considered reactionary, unpatriotic, bigoted, or worse. 

Yes (R), which means my time as a 1960's Tennessee Congressman might have been rather short :)

I am greatly disappointed that we have so many people on this forum who voted "no".  I don't think a "no" vote means someone is a racist.  Yet, a "no" vote on this issue in 1964 was certainly a vote to enable racists to infringe on freedom.

Racial discrimination is by far the greatest threat to individual liberty that has ever been faced by any group of individuals in our country's history.

The federal government was the only agent with the political and logistic capability to attempt to restore that natural liberty.  The freedom for many individuals to be able to gain equal access to prosperity and happiness far outweighs the infringement on the right of a restaurant owner or businessman to discriminate against a man based on his skin pigmentation.

Says the white teenager still in highschool..... (Yes, hispanics are white, especially Cuban hispanics.)

------------------------------------

While I do think the sections in question are flawed I would vote yes.

yes

With great enthusiasm, yes.

Absolutely true.  It's why it wasn't unconstitutional.  And Howard Baker was elected to the Senate in Tennessee in 1966 on a pro-integration platform.

An employment decision is partially subjective and partially objective.  Large corporations often even have mandatory rules on promotion.  There's also tons of circumstantial evidence in many cases that sheds light on the decision.  Of course the defendant in one of these cases knows what was going on in their head.  But, of course they are going to claim they didn't discriminate no matter what.

Title VII does not adopt a quota system.  They use a burden-shifting framework created by the Supreme Court in the 1970s. 


It isn't grounded in a property right in your job.  It's grounded in an interest in equal treatment based on race.  The part where you get the job or money damages is just the remedy.  I feel like your concern is more about substantive due process rights of employers.


Racial discrimination is not always open and obvious.  Racism more broadly can be completely covert and even unconscious.  To address the purely social aspects of racism, you need to change the moral norms of your society.  Part of the job of the law is to create and protect moral norms.


I would agree affirmative action and similar programs are a major concern constitutionally.  But, white people still enjoy an advantaged position in this country.  There is no general anti-white bias in America. 

But he still makes Republicans look racist.

So you believe that using circumstantial evidence can allow us to read minds, which is what it would require to know if someone was discriminating based on race?


As I mentioned earlier, just because it does not create a quota system de jure does not mean that it does not incentivize quotas de facto, ceteris paribus.


But how can there be a remedy for someone who has no damages?


Again, this is a chicken-or-the-egg question. You assume that moral norms arise from law, I question whether it isn't the other way around.

The court system makes factual findings on mental states all the time.  And you don't need to know to a certainty that there was a discriminatory purpose.  It's not as difficult as you think.


To the extent it does that it's wrong.  But, at some level we have to triage the harms.  In 1964, the harm to minorities was so widespread that it outweighed the collateral problems you raise.


They have consequential damages as a result of being discriminated against. 


It's a two-way causal relation.  My point is that when you know the people that are disproportionately the victims of discrimination and you know that many forms of discrimination are hard to detect, you should think about putting a thumb on the scale in order to get some deterrence and social change in favor of the minority that has been screwed over for hundreds of years.

Just because the court system currently does it does not justify the practice. I'm not a believer in thought crimes.


Do you have an objective criterion for determining what level of harm to minorities is sufficient to outweight the problem of incentivizing the employment of less qualified individuals?


Such as? 


If it's so hard to detect that the perpetrator is not being penalized for it in the competitive marketplace, what makes you think a monopolistic judge is capable of performing the task?

It's not a thought crime.  It's an action, like firing someone for example, with a certain mental state attached.  Pretty much all crimes require a certain mental state.  If courts couldn't make findings on mental states you couldn't have the legal system.


Basically, the court awards damages that put the person in the position they would have been in absent discrimination.


I don't really accept your premise that the marketplace prevents racial discrimination.  I do think that most potential cases are never bought.  The vast majority that get filed are settled or dismissed.  The few that go to trial have the best evidentiary record.  For that small percentage, I trust the court system to do a decent job.  But, the bigger issue is that the act as a whole creates  a societal norm that it's wrong to treat someone differently because of their race, gender or ethnicity.

I think society needs to have that norm.  That's a value judgement on my part.  Obviously, it doesn't justify any policy.  I'm sure Title VII can be improved upon and it is less urgent today because we've made tremendous progress (in large part thanks to the Civil Rights Act).

From the Oxford English Dictionary:
Thoughtcrime
noun
an instance of unorthodox or controversial thinking, considered as a criminal offence or as socially unacceptable.

If someone decides not to hire a black because they are black, any charges against them are clearly thought crimes.

There's a difference between having a thought and acting because of a thought.  If that hypothetical racist doesn't want to violate the law, they can just choose not to work in an HR department.  That way they can think racist thoughts to their hearts' content.

If you don't believe mental states are at all significant to the law, do you believe in differentiating first degree murder from accidentally killing someone in a car wreck?

It's a thought crime because the action would not have been a crime in the absence of the thought.

So, insider trading is a thought crime?  Mail fraud is a thought crime? Section 1001?  Fraud?   Last time I checked, selling stocks, sending mail and making statements to people is legal.  Tons of laws also have a scienter requirement where there's no crime unless you have specific intent of some kind.

Just because Orwell has permeated other realms of the law does not justify the practice. Any law ought to have a clear victim, in which case whether or not the perpetrator was aware of his actions is immaterial, a mitigating factor at best. The person who bought rat poison sold as milk would have had his property rights violated regardless of whether or not the vendor actually thought it was milk. However, even if we accept the dubious premise that an applicant who has been racially discriminated against has had his rights violated (even though he has no right to a employment contract to begin with), nobody would allege that an applicant's rights have been violated if the employer hired a different individual. It only becomes a crime according to this logic if the employer used race as a factor in his hiring decision, something that only the employer can know until the day that mind-reading technology is perfected.

OK, good luck fundamentally changing the American legal system with your circular libertarian reasoning.

Of course, and I supported it in real time. The idea of branding cohorts of folks as second class, inferior, and unwanted, is facially just plain evil to me. It does not comport with my conscience. The idea that the libertarian right to control of property should be allowed to trump avoiding slapping scarlet letters on folks suggests a value system that lacks peripheral vision, to put it most euphemistically.

No (decidedly abnormal)

[/troll]

Of course. Not voting for this would (and should) be near-criminal. Our Constitution guarantees equality under the law and preaches the inherent equality of men, no argument on property or personal liberty can trump that. Of course nothing less can be expected of crypto-segregationist, neo-Confederate libertarians, but that doesn't make your objection any less morally repugnant. It's one thing to dismiss it as narrow ideologism, but except for the ignorant naive fringe (who, in their defense, I think are most of our libertarians), it's nothing more than a crude constitutional cover for racism, again, ignoramuses aside. I mean, do you seriously think some white business owner would have sued against Jim Crow on property rights grounds? Do you think it would have even been heard by a state appeal court? Do you think the "race traitor" would have even survived the attempt?

Seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle black, given that you originally cited precedent in the law for criminalizing motive as a defense for laws criminalizing motive.

I brought up other laws to rebut your criticism of Title VII.  My point is that Title VII is not remarkable in that "thoughcrime" respect.  Your criticism makes no sense unless you're willing to jettison most of the legal system. 

Where did you get this idiosyncratic legal theory from? 

Of course not.  Not with Negroes being systematically excluded from the polls and by extension the juries.  Not with Negroes having been subjected to de jure economic discrimination against them until the 1960s.  As a temporary measure intended to redress the harm done previously by the law, the provisions of Title VII could be justified.  However, it wasn't enacted as a temporary measure was it?

I believe that if Titles II and VII were repealed today, there would be an insignificant amount of discrimination in public accommodations.  In employment, there would unfortunately be significant levels of discrimination in employment against African-Americans and to a lesser degree women.  However, it would not be the most significant economic impediment facing African-Americans.  That would be the decidedly inferior schools many urban areas and black belt rural areas have.  Fixing the problems in education and also those indirectly caused by how the war on drugs has been fought should be a higher priority right now, but the solutions for those are neither as obvious or easy as the solutions adopted to combat over racism.

And just to be clear, I'm not advocating repealing or amending Title II or VII, at least not right now.  It's too early to phase out Title VII, and phasing out Title II alone would be sending the wrong signal.

How much of a difference did the bill have in terms of black employment?  Or for other minorities and for whites? It would be interesting to see some data on this if it exists.

The BLS might have the data on employment rates by race and occupation for the 1960's.  I'm fairly certain they have the data on overall employment, but a major shift was in having fields previously denied them in some areas open up.

No, just move to the Eastern districts and run there. The first and second would vote for a horse if it was a Republican, even back then.

No (D)

No(I/O)

I am Really Strongly Against the Civil Rights Acts of 1964

I would have voted "no" on the act as it was written.  However, I would have tried to slightly alter the bill.  The two alterations I would have made would be to eliminate Title II from the act completely and to alter Title VII. Title II infringed on the rights of private business owners' property rights and Title III provided adequate protection to ensure everyone was served at government facilities.  I would have changed Title VII so that it didn't apply to private employers but would still apply to government employees.  After removing the sections about "public accommodations" and private employment I wouldn't just have voted yes, I would have actively campaigned along side Senator Goldwater in favor of the act.  
Yes, some liberal Democrats like Robert Byrd voted against the act for racial reasons but for myself and Goldwater, our opposition came from the infringement on the right of private individuals.
Modern day, I absolutely agree Title II should be repealed.  You should have the right to refuse service to anyone.  As far as title VII goes, I feel less strongly in favor of repeal but would definitely like to see more religious exemptions added to Title VII, like the ones seen in ENDA of 2013.  Just as SCOTUS ruled part of the Voting Rights Act no longer necessary and unconstitutional, I would like them to do the same with Title II and maybe with title VII.

"Yes" without big problems...

Aye, with only slight objections on the anti-discrimination parts.

Yes

I'd try to make it stronger and more comprehensive first, but yes.

I'd love to see if Ernest/Sam have since changed their views.

No

We have been ALL about bumping old topics lately ... anyway, Yes (R).

Absolutely. This may have ended my political career though, assuming I was representing my birth state of Louisiana.

Yes (R)

Yes (D).